Google helps with Santa Monica parking

Black Friday is a good day to highlight this neat little piece of technology: Google maps and the city of Santa Monica have teamed up to produce a real-time Google map that helps you find parking in downtown Santa Monica.

The map debuted a while back, but I just learned about it recently from Google. Icons are used to show the different parking structures and how many open spaces are in each of them. The city of Santa Monica's parking space website doesn't seem to work as well -- when I click on different parking structures, I'm getting information from about 12:30 a.m. Friday, not 12:30 p.m.

I'm having trouble getting the Google map to load on my iPhone. If you know how to do this, please leave a comment.

-- Steve Hymon