I spent most of this afternoon at the Google East HQ at the Google Maps and Earth Hackathon. I am very glad I attended as I entered with basically zero knowledge about how to write code for Google Maps and now I know enough to get started. About 40 people attended the hackathon and surprisingly only about 50% had Macs - was nice to see.

I sat next to a few NY Times employees who appear to have a great handle on coding for Maps and Earth. I left my card with them and hope to get a video interview to learn more about how they are utilizing the technology at the Times. My advice is even if you aren't a developer, check out the hackathon events just to see what the latest uses are for the various Google tools.

Googlers Roman, Manu and Osama were on hand to help with questions. Each provided an overview at the beginning of the session which included a few pretty interesting examples:

• Yelp uses a static Google Map on review pages but if you interact with the map, it immediately loads the full, dynamic rich experience. This helps Yelp keep the initial page load as light as possible but offering the full functionality when needed.
• Trulia uses the standard Google Maps API but overlays their own tools around the map to make it more personalized.
• There was another example but it appears I wrote it down incorrectly. I thought it was "galagi.com" - basically the site combines Maps and Earth and allows you to "drive" a route after you enter a set of addresses. It was pretty damn cool and if anyone knows the actual site name, please leave it in a comment.

After the intial demos, the Google team was around answering questions. Each of the Googlers spent over 15 minutes with me talking about different examples and showing me various code snippets. Google even offered a fancy spread of food for everyone.

I talked with some of the attendees about why Google Maps continues to increase their share against Mapquest. My belief is that it's events like the Hackathon today that shows the reason. Google made their Maps tool open to allow people to build upon it. It's not just a simple map/driving directions tool -- when you see what people build upon it, you know it's way more than that. Sure Mapquest will continue to add new features -- but will it be enough to keep the service top of mind, even for the less than average Internet users like my mother? More on this topic soon.