As anticipated, Google expanded its burgeoning global empire on Tuesday by buying the Israeli social traffic and mapping service Waze. You might recognize Waze as the GPS app with a soul. Pretty soon you're going to know it as the thing that made your commute bearable once and for all.

Twitter has compiled a series of maps showing geo-located Tweet volumes since 2009. The resulting maps are intricate, gorgeous — and even a bit revealing.

This version of London's iconic tube map looks just like the official PDF of the transport network—but in fact it is created entirely from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Maps are among the essential items to take whenever you're in a car. These days they mostly come in GPS form, but back in the day there were times when you'd have to figure out exactly where you are based on nothing but the surrounding features and a map.

Yesterday, the annual numbers for car sales in the United States came out, and for the most part, there was plenty of reason for people who make and sell cars to be happy and tip big. Sales were up, overall, by 13%, with nearly 14.5 million cars sold. That's a lot of cars.

This TEDx Dublin talk from Aris Venetikidis is pretty fascinating, especially to the design geeks out there. In the talk, he covers how the maps we build in our heads are usually pretty wildly different than the actuality of the terrain, simplifying streets to be straight, turns to be 90° or 45°, and attaching…

Trouble with Apple Maps? Being led down the wrong road, or worse, down roads that don't even exist? Don't worry! All you need are some good ol' fashioned Apple Maps directions to set you straight.

We've talked plenty about the flaws inherent in Apple Maps, and where it differs from Google Maps on paper. But how wide is the disparity between the two in actuality? We stacked two iPhone 4Ses side-by-side (one running iOS 5, one running iOS 6, both on wi-fi with GPS on), and let the two mapping apps do battle.

The U.S. Interstates as a Subway Map infographic is a subway-style map of America's interstate highways, and it's pretty handy for quickly planning a cross-country trip. You can see at a glance how the highways connect and the major cities along the way.

Six months before Saab the car company went under the last time, Apple, in complete secrecy, bought a futuristic mapping spinoff from Saab the defense contractor. The secret is now out and maps on mobile devices will never be the same.