Google Maps broadened its features with the introduction of “Nearby places you might like,” solidifying its role as a vehicle to plan your hotel stay, dining experience or activity.

No, Google Maps isn’t necessarily a hotels.com, TripAdvisor or a Zagat killer, but it sure is becoming a nifty place to begin trip-planning, with its plethora of user reviews, photos, videos and basic information about hotels, restaraurants and activities — and now alternative venues in the area.

So, if you search for the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square on Google Maps, you’ll find that Google has aggregated information about almost everything you might want to know about the property. If you scroll down the page past the basic property information, the photos, videos, map and user reviews, you’ll find “Nearby places you might like” and it looks like the following:

Nearby Places isn’t flashy and it is flawed, but it does provides a handy way — with links, star rating and user reviews — to search for other area hotels.

You’ll notice that although the New York Marriott Marquis is a four-star property in the very touristy Times Square, Nearby Places provides links to the 2 1/2-star Pennsylvania Hotel, as well as to Hotel Gansevoort, which isn’t exactly nearby or similar with its location  almost two miles away in the meat-packing district.

Google says of Nearby Places: “You’ll notice that we do not limit these suggestions to places sharing any specific characteristic; instead, we use a broad set of signals to come up with what are hopefully the most interesting suggestions. We’re still working on refining these signals, so bear with us if your serendipitous discovery of a new place is even more unexpected than you’d anticipated.”

Thus, some further refining may be in order if Google’s goal is to eventually furnish similar, nearby places.

You can use the new Google Maps feature to search for nearby restaurants and activities, as well.

For example, if you are looking for an activity to replace — or to supplement — your visit to NorthStar Trekking in Juneau, Alaska, Nearby Places points you to the following venues to consider.

Thus, Google Maps is continuing its evolution into an online destination guide.

The only thing missing is an integrated booking engine.

To many people this could be the next best thing. In truth Augmented Reality has been around for some time.

Originally deployed in a commercial environment by Sky Sports, we have been exposed to it probably without knowing it.

The use of displays on playing fields via TV (for example showing the play in American Football) is a common indication.

The techniques have been borrowed from film where CGI and live action are frequently merged together with stunning effect.

Does anyone remember mixed animation in Mary Poppins or the stunningly beautiful sequence of Disney’s Tron?

Fast forward to this year and we will start to see more use of tools to assist us.

With our ability to both comprehend and process data/information becoming increasingly challenged – we poor inadequate humans need some additional tools. And we are about to get them.

For travel, what will start out as simple standalone applications will grow perhaps faster than we think – developing into augmented reality.

This will include the ability to take virtual trips ahead of actually taking them. We can trial our road trips today with Google Maps Drive and Walking views.

Here is an example of a street I used to live on in LA – as you can see it has been augmented with digital information combined with the image.

As travel gets more personal and more visual you will be able to take advantage of these tools to better understand what your choices are.

Social media too is getting into the act with users posting their images with the ones from Google.

Now do you get it?

Not quite as good as Chancey Gardner – but its getting to be the next best thing to being there….

FareCompare introduced a Twitter beta today that mashes-up Google Maps, FareCompare deal tweets from consumers’ favorite departure airports and Twitter users who are following those alerts from selected airports.

Fare alerts on social networks like Twitter and Facebook have become a hot arena as companies like FareCompare, Travelzoo, Travelocity and countless others vie for bookings and the allegiances of deal-hungry consumers.

FareCompare’s Twitter beta takes the competition to the next level by attempting to further engage consumers with a Web 2.0, community-oriented flavor.

“This is the first pass at creating tools that help establish a multi-way social conversation and interactivity from the Twitter channel,” FareCompare CEO Rick Seaney says.

In the beta, FareCompare uses its 170 flyfrom Twitter accounts, pulls recent fare-alert tweets from an API, and displays them on a Google Map. Consumers can click on a deal and then launch the FareCompare calendar-based search. Here’s what the Where-to-Go Getaway Map looks like with airfare deals from Newark Airport:

One of the cool things about the beta is that the profiles of Twitter users who have signed up for FareCompare’s deal alerts from a selected airport appear below the map so consumers can tweet to one another about the merits or demerits of the deals or about anything else. Below is a depiction of consumers who are following flyfromEWR:

And, the Twitteratti can retweet the fare alerts or e-mail them to whomever like this:

“The basic idea will be to send deal tweets on our channels to this location and highlight the deal, not to just get a price quote, but to let the user interact with the deal or change their mind and interact with other possible deals with their friends and colleagues,” Seaney says.

The interactivity has its limits for now, Seaney concedes, but he promises more to come.

“The interactivity at this point is consumers being able to interact wiht a map display with all current deals, e-mail or retweet the deals, and check out other people in their area from the flyfrom account,” Seaney says. “We’ll soon have a variety of new interactivity to their own follower list.”

If in 2009, the first-movers in sending fare alerts through social media were happy just to get them out there on Facebook, Twitter and other networks, the FareCompare beta signals that in 2010 the fare-alert proposition will have to get more interactive and sophisticated.

Perhaps we’re moving toward Fare Alert 2.0.