The Google LatLong blog has announced that the YouTube-styled embedded maps mentioned last week are now a reality:

Today we’re excited to announce a new feature on Google Maps that allows you to add maps to your blog or website just by copying and pasting a snippet of HTML. And once you embed the map, it has all the same functionality of the Google Maps you know and love; it’s clickable, draggable, and zoomable.

Let’s just give this bad boy a try. So we pull up a map… click on “Link to this page”… copy and paste the HTML in… and presto. I should have a map here.

View Larger Map And what do you know… I do. It doesn’t play nicely with WordPress, though. As soon as I dropped the code snippet it, the map tried to load and overtook my entire editing window. Clicking back and forth between visual and source code didn’t help, either. I had to save and quickly switch over to the source code view before the map had a chance to load. But otherwise, this is a very handy feature.

As you can see, the map is, in fact, just as interactive here as it is at Google Maps. Here’s another map with some of Springfield’s sushi restaurants pointed out. This should really make using Google Maps much more “mainstream”.

View Larger Map