I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited for the release of the movie “Bourne Ultimatum.” It’s top on my list of “must-see” movies for this Summer, and if you’re as excited as I am, you’ll probably be interested in “The Ultimate Search for Bourne with Google.” Universal Studios and Google have teamed up to promote the movie and prizes are involved!

Remember in May when we wrote about Google’s new Mapplets? The developer preview is over and it’s now live! Mapplets are mini-webpages served inside an IFrame within Google Maps that allows users to create their own mapping mash-ups. According to Google, ever since the official Google Maps API was released in June 2005, over 50,000 Mashups have been created.

I just went over to the Google Maps page and noticed a new feature that said "" Curiosity got the best of me so I decided to try it out to see what it did, and after creating a route I noticed that I can make Google Maps go the way I want it to when giving directions. Check it out in this very quick video that I put together:

Google has stepped outside (literally) with Google Maps by giving you a Street View of a few cities. It is actually pretty cool, and from the looks of it they must have mounted several cameras on top of a vehicle in a 360 degree fashion. Then as they drove along they snapped high-quality images to use with Google Maps. This is the result: