The Google Maps team announced yesterday that the popular mapping service will now support the hCard microformat in search results. The hCard microformat is a way of encoding address information which makes it easier to export address/contact info into other applications.
Now when you search for a business in Google Maps your browser can recognize the address and contact information in the page, which makes it easy to transfer it to an address book or phone.
For Firefox users there's a there are two add-ons that offer microformats support, Operator or Tails. If you're an IE or Safari user, the microformats wiki has some bookmarklets that enable those browsers to grab and pass on hCard info or convert it into the format used by GMail.
Also, if you've got some form of Google Maps on your own site, you can add microformats by making a few slight changes to your HTML. For more info on microformats, see our earlier tutorial or head over to the official site.
Google Maps may not be the first to embrace microformats, but it is definitely one of the largest services and should significantly increase the public's exposure to the usefulness of microformats.
