[finder] and Jesus said, "I can see your house from here!"

Several years ago I realized that whenever I met a new piece of communications technology I had no hesitation about who I contacted first with it. It's like the guy on TV shouting, "Hi, mom!" into the camera. Who do you call when you have nothing to say? Just which person this was shifted over time (though usually it was someone I was dating or a faraway childhood friend) but I never consciously assigned anyone to the role, having never really been into "best friends" even when I was much younger. I just always knew who I wanted to email/SMS/etc. when it came up.

By some inversion of the same idea, online mapping has apparently passed some critical test of technological intimacy in my mind. I fiddled around with maps.google.com for a while when they announced it last week just like I had with Mapquest and whatever else. But for some reason I started wanting to do little personal things I had never done with it before-- sending a map of the neighborhood I grew up in to friends, or tracing the routes I walk around here. Google Maps has neat features, but none of the ideas that popped into my head were things I couldn't have done with other online maps. Google just made me WANT to do them.