Google probably has a better key to profit via Maps than it could ever hope to get by building a completely new social network. So dumb that it was so desperate to imitate Facebook and Apple that it let its best products languish or die, even though many of them (e.g. Reader) contained social network microcosms.
I consider Google Maps to be far more useful and better than Facebook. The sans/quality of G+ doesn't impact my view of Google Maps. It's just an amazing product, that got even better once it came on those feature phones with pseudo browsers, even if it took a whole minute to load some tiles, it was still amazing for going to appointments in new areas.
I have a lot of childhood memories of my dad in the car messing around in the dark with physical maps only to find a torn page or inaccuracies, heh.
Google Maps has reached its true potential only now that everyone has a smartphone with GPS. I don't think that it was entirely clear in 2010 just how important mobile would be, or that Google would play such a dominant role on mobile devices. The company was still fixated on Facebook's rise, but it's since jettisoned the focus on social networking (after Google Plus failed to take off).
Is that really so? I have actually stopped using Google Maps over the last couple of years as the last few redesigns have made it less useful and more frustrating. I would say that 2010 represents the peak of Google Maps' usefulness, and whatever it has been doing since then looks more like squandering potential than realizing it.
...But I also found Google Maps to be excruciating and effectively unusable on a mobile phone when I first tried it. I don't think I've actually tried using Google Maps on a phone since their last redesign. Perhaps that's what happened, they just switched from a design that was usable on a computer to a design that was usable on a phone, but I'd already given up on the phone experience so I didn't notice.
I don't think it's quite there yet. Google Maps for Mobile still has a ways to go in terms of feature completeness & accuracy, and there are a ton of additional ways search & profile data can be mined & surfaced in Maps results.
Although incremental improvements in data quality and data mining can certainly still improve the user experience (I've personally encountered many frustrating examples of this), their potential impact is clear now that everyone has Maps in their pocket.
The value of any such improvements to end users was drastically magnified by the availability of Maps on mobile devices with GPS. And that shift required many advances to occur independently of Google - Apple and the Android OEMs played a key role.
