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Six months ago, Google launched Google City Tours. A Labs product for Google Maps, City Tours was based around pedestrian sight-seeing, with maps, walking times and sight suggestions. Now Google is continuing to edge into travel (at least pedestrian travel) with enhancements to City Tours . They’ve added more detailed directions and travel times as well as integrated better with My Maps and tweaked the UI. Interestingly, some of these were already in place in Google Maps but just recently added to City Tours: Today, we start providing complete pedestrian routing information for every step of your tour, taking road types, bridges and bodies of water into account just like a regular Google Maps walking directions search . We still try to minimise the time you spend walking and we still won’t recommend a visit to an attraction when we think it’s closed but, now, the suggested tours are a whole lot closer to reality. You can also now import your own My Maps or other public My Maps to create walking tours: create or find a My Map with the sights you want to see and City Tours will customize a walking tour with detailed directions for you. So City Tours is not bad and getting better—but is this really Google making the first steps toward Google Travel?

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Google Edging into Travel Again

Google is taking mobile very seriously, as in they are partnering with Audi to bring Google services including Google Earth to the A8. This marks the continuation of Google’s attempts to bring their services into automobiles and does it at a new level. According to Google’s Lat Long blog : With their newly unveiled Audi A8, Audi is the first car manufacturer to bring Google Earth directly into the vehicle and to combine that with a set of useful Google services. We’ve worked closely with them to create a compelling in-car experience integrated with the Audi navigation system. You’ll be able to enjoy 3D satellite imagery, terrain information and a wealth of additional geo information relevant to your current location: layers like Wikipedia to learn more about your surroundings or Panoramio images to get another view. Wow, that is pretty neat. Of course, some folks are going to have concerns about just how interactive this is especially when the area of greatest consideration while in a car has not changed since the first one rolled off the assembly line: pay attention and stay safely on the road. Here’s a picture of the system in the car. Another nice feature is the tie in with the desktop that has been developed which will roll up local search and Google Maps in the services offered with the A8. You can send business listings directly from Google Maps to your car: search for an address at your desk, send it to the car, and by the time you go to the parking lot your car will know where to go. While in the car, you can use Google Local Search in the same rich quality as at your desk. Imagine you get hungry on the way or want to find a cinema – simply perform a live Google search on your car navigation system and immediately get up-to-date, rich and relevant results. I’m not sure how that live search is going to be preformed (hopefully at a red light or stop sign but that’s not likely) so it sounds real cool but would be even better to see in person. Of course, seeing it ‘in person’ comes with an MSRP for the A8 of $74,550-$78,400. Unfortunately, I was not compensated with my own A8 for this post (c’mon, Andy, what gives?). I just felt you needed to know that so I won’t get in trouble with the government. Despite that, here’s to driving informed!

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Google Services Takes the Audi A8 for a Spin

Isn’t everything better with Twitter? All right, let’s admit it: we had to see at least part of this coming. Microsoft Live search had maps with bird’s eye view and even the equivalent of Street View in some places, and we all had to know that eventually that product would get rolled over to the Bing brand, too. Well, now that’s happening: but Bing wants to take it to the next level. And, of course, the best, most obvious way to take maps to the next level is to add Twitter. Everything is cooler with teh social, right? Now in beta , Bing Maps uses the same Silverlight technology that Microsoft Live Maps did, including directions, street-level views and even museum tours—but now with Twitter’s geolocation API, they have a “mash in” to add Tweets (so not only can you see the mummies, you can also read 19 Tweets saying how boring they are). Other “maps apps” include traffic, what’s nearby, hyperlocal content, 3D images from Photosynth, webcams, roadside attractions, restaurants, public artwork and . . . graffiti (really?). The street level views (called Streetside) are obviously not as complete as Google Maps’. Bing (No coverage outside the continental US; the blue dude is just the cursor): Google (just in the US; they’re in more than a dozen other countries, too): What do you think? Will Twitter and museum tours be enough to get a leg up on MapQuest and Google Maps?

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Bing Revamps Maps—Now with Twitter!