@cleverjake is right. It's a hack. Who cares why? It's play! It's fun. It looks cool, and I wouldn't underestimate the ability for "useless toys" to inspire rea

@cleverjake is right. It's a hack. Who cares why? It's play! It's fun. It looks cool, and I wouldn't underestimate the ability for "useless toys" to inspire really compelling and useful projects. Hell, I'll even go ahead and play devils advocate and pitch a potential commercial usage for this in the friendly spirit of attacking your cynicism on two fronts :) -- I could imagine an app/site that uses this as a basic to create simple and stylized maps that are suitable for poster-hanging. I see lots of simplified stylized maps that do things like list all of the beach towns or surf breaks along the coast in my area. This could be used to create maps of everywhere in the neighborhood that might be compelling to a child (parks, their friend's houses, the beach, etc).. You could choose icons for the map points, tweak the color palette with a fun drag-tool and order a print... Or make a treasure map for a kid's birthday party. (Obvious potential legal issues using gmaps for this which I won't bother to look into withstanding). At any rate, I think it's an awesome project, whether or not it has obvious and immediately convertible value... and if someone did a good job building a site as described above, I'd be an immediate customer.