Considering the success of Wiki-Mapia in India, it isn’t suprising Map Maker was a product developed by Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) Indian engineering team. Take a quick look at the most described cities*, and Bombay tops the list on Wiki-mapia with 55,577 listings, followed by Calcutta at the second spot and Chennai on fourth. Infact, out of the Top 20 most described cities, 14 are Indian, with 4 out of 5 making it to the top 5 although Hindi is the 7th in the most used languages list. Do note however that a large volume of these listings happen to be listings of individual residences. Mapmaker itself heavily draws upon edit tools inspired by Wiki-Mapia, however, it’s not as arbid in its moderation system as the latter. Depth of listings seems to have increased already, take for example this medical and general store, situated in Sion (W). The service seems to be the second in a series of Google products, after Knol, that are attempting to capture a percentage of the user-base that wiki’s have garnered by replicating their services. Other than India, Google Map Maker is available in 57 countries in Asia, the Island Nations, and the Caribbean.

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