April Fools day isn't until tomorrow, but Google has added a silly new feature to maps early: play Pac-Man on any streets you please.

When you actually sit down to wonder about how news of an actual zombie apocalypse would spread, you tend to assume it'll slowly trickle in on Twitter or blow up after a big CDC press release. You don't think that you'll learn about it from Google Maps, of all places. Alas, truth is stranger than fiction, and the apocalypse is nigh.

Man, trying to find directions to places is just so boring. Isn't there a way that we can make it as compelling as wandering around in tall grass trying to find Pokémon? Wait, there is? Tell us more, Google Maps!

Gregg Matthews and Chris Officer are walking on the Florida beaches, in hiking boots, with camera orbs strapped to their backs as a job. The Florida tourism agency is paying them and one other team to gather images that will be compiled into panoramas and then sold to Google Maps-- all 825 miles of it.

Visit Earl's Court Road on Google Street View, and click on the double arrows. End up in a time machine. Yep, that's just about how most of my trips to London go.

England, I've got a bone to pick with you. As a college student I studied abroad in London for a whole four months and nothing exciting happened at all. Since I left, though, you guys got the Doctor Who Experience, a royal wedding, David Tennant and Catherine Tate doing Shakespeare together, and now a Harry Potter Warner Brothers Studio Tour! Not fair, England! Well, at least now I'll be able to live through the eyes of other tourists vicariously using street view images of the Diagon Alley set that Google Maps just released recently. You guys don't know how good you have it.

Google Maps pranks are great, particularly when they indulge in surreal and almost-creepy imagery for maximum weirdness. Like, yeah, mooning the camera on top of the Street View car is fun and all, but you know you're just going to get blurred out so what's the point? Better to round up a group of people flash-mob style to do something completely bizarre with rubber masks, which is what this bunch of Japanese students did. I mean, I'm just assuming -- As Doctor Who taught us, they've got to be students to get that many people dressed up and being silly. That or they're aliens. Doctor Who taught us that, too.

In what will probably go down as the least creepy way anyone ever combined Google Maps and face recognition, the hard-working dweebs at German design studio onformative have created Google Faces, a tool that automatically searches for face-like features in landscape images culled from Google Maps. 

To me, the Street View function of Google Maps is generally more entertaining than necessarily helpful, but it's a good tool for scoping out a place you intend to visit. But the creative people of Teehan+Lax have found a new way to use the tool: Google Street View Hyperlapse, a Chrome-based gadget that lets you make an awesome video sequence out of Street View images. Basically, it allows you to pretend to be the Flash anywhere the Google Street View car has been, thereby fulfilling at least several childhood dreams here in the Geekosystem office.

In December of last year, Google Maps was facing scrutiny in Germany for potentially violating European Union privacy laws. Things haven't gotten easier for Google in that country, because now Google Maps faces a complete ban in Germany due to a patent dispute with Microsoft. If Microsoft wins the ruling, Google will have to take some pretty extreme measures to keep Google Maps out of Germany. Hope you didn't want to find your away Germany, everybody. It's about to get a little more difficult for you, or more expensive for Google.

Google was in the news yet again this past Monday when the internet community bore witness to a disturbing picture of what appeared to be a donkey that was struck by a roving Google Maps Street View car in the Kweneng region of Botswana, Africa. News of the donkey-related vehicular homicide spread quickly and caused quite the uproar on various social media outlets -- despite what others may say, the Internet truly does care for the welfare of pack animals -- demanding that Google stop hiding behind its money piles and explain itself. Caving from the heat brought down on them, the company made a statement today to deny any and all allegations that they're a bunch of monstrous donkey slayers.

Earlier this week, we reported that Windows Phone owners were disappointed to discover that accessing Google Maps on their Internet Explorer web browser redirected them to the company's search engine homepage. It's no mystery that Microsoft and Google can never be seated in the same room together, but it was still a pretty low blow on the latter's part. After a juvenile back-and-forth between the two tech companies over WebKit browsers, rendering engines, and all that other nonsense jargon, Google has -- we assume reluctantly -- extended the proverbial olive branch and is once again offering Windows Phone users access to Google Maps via Internet Explorer. Hopefully, this move will be enough to ease any tensions that had arisen from the past upset.

Google and Microsoft have a history of not exactly being on the most amicable of terms. Like any good technology company, they've reluctantly worked and existed within the same sphere together, but that's about the gist of it. There's no love lost between them. That's why when Google began redirecting Windows Phone users to the homepage rather than Google Maps, folks were quick to cry foul. Google never supported Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, but that doesn't mean their redirect isn't silly.

It took long enough, but Google Maps is finally back on the iPhone. Most people celebrated its return, but the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany is saying a feature of the revived app violates European data protection laws. That may be true, but we're just glad we can confidently look up where Schleswig-Holstein is on the iPhone again.

Gone are those grim and dark days when iOS users were forced to access Google Maps via their phone's web browser or resort to celestial navigation. Google Maps is once again available for download on iTunes. For quite some time, those with iPhones pined for the convenience and unique features of Google's mapping service. Now that the grueling wait for the app is at last over, the world is now their proverbial oyster.

Last week we showed you a new series of NASA satellite photographs of the Earth at night. They were gorgeous, but what if you wanted to see what a specific place on Earth looked like at night? Now you can! It looks like Google went and overlaid the satellite images on top of their map service, and now it's searchable. Type in your address and see what your region of the world looks like at night.

One of two things was bound to happen: Apple was going to fix its terrible Maps app, or Google was going to do it for them. It looks like it's going to be the latter. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is getting ready to submit a new Google Maps app to the iTunes Store. iPhone users the world over rejoice.