Take for example this Pedometer. Center the map on the area you’d like to measure, set it in record mode, then double click on the start point and then each additional point. The system will provide a total distance travelled as you add each point. Simple and useful and two thumbs up from me. It turns out my walk from the office to the post office is a mile longer than I thought at a little over 3 miles, as compared to the ~2 miles my car’s odometer was reporting.

It’s too bad that it wasn’t possible to keep the distance measuring tool found in the code google modeled their map system on (maps24) but this is the next best thing to it that I’ve come across.