Why man creates …

There I was playing with Google Earth that first day. I found a bunch of interesting things. I looked at my house. I looked at my Dad's house.

What the heck is that thing near Dad's house?

So I phoned him up. After I utterly failed to describe the thing I was seeing in Google Earth well enough for him to identify it, I talked him through installing Google Earth and finding his house.

We found the thing and identified it. Then we went off looking at other interesting things.

But showing each other stuff in Google Earth was not easy. We could read off the coordinates and hope that we were both really seeing the same thing, after typing them in and flying to the location.

Or we could make a placemark, export it to a kml file, email the file, wait for the other to open it up in Google Earth. Then we could discuss it.

Plan A was a lot of trouble and not very reliable. Plan B worked well, but was expensive in long distance plan minutes. It was just too bad I couldn't do Plan B in real time.

Some time later I was trying to figure out whether I could program a game inside of Google Earth. So I was reading the KML standard to find out what kind of thing I could do within Google Earth. There, within the description of NetworkLinks, was an example — “Making a placemark of your current view.”

I could have a web server make a placemark of my current view, and then it could send that placemark back to me? Inside Google Earth?

If I could get my Dad to look at the same web server inside Google Earth at the same time as me, he could see the placemark of my current view.

Cool!

How does it work?