Ask Gets Embeddable maps

I've been a fan of Ask's Maps product, Ask City, since it launched (Radar post). Now Ask has made its web app viral by adding embeddable maps.

Much like Google's embedded maps (Radar post), this only requires a simple cut-n-paste to utilize the feature. You can use all of Ask's mapping tools, including drawing tools and movie searches on an embeddable map.

I am surprised that Ask is the first of the major mapping portals to add this feature after Google. I don't see this as a copy or a me-too feature. I see embeddable maps as one of the fundamental features that a user is going to expect from their mapping portal -- just like one does a video or photo sharing site.

More types of websites are going to become easily, anonymously embeddable in the future. When users put work into customizing or upoading content, they are going to want to be able to put it on their own sites. Google has been experimenting with embeddable Ajax search widgets, but those widgets still exist under the Google Code umbrella. I bet that many of these search pages (multimedia, web and local) will soon have their own embed links.