A couple months ago, I remember playing Google Earth and thought it was ok but more or less just forgot about it.  Last week, I decided to give it another look and found it amazing.  I think the reason why I gave it a second look because I wanted to compare it the new Microsoft local.live.com.

Its "fly to location" feature is quite awesome and enchants my 3 year old son who is totally into maps.  The community feature is pretty neat, as well.  People can "pushpin" points of interest and share.  These can be turned on and show right up in the map.  

I was looking at some burning oil fields in Iraq and it made me think about the "time" issue with satellite images.  It would be interesting to be able to compare a region overtime.  This could be interesting for a number of reasons:

• aforementioned Iraq
• Stadiums or buildings as they are being built
• before/after of New Orleans
• suburbs growth