.. or should.
I just stumbled* across this rather neat Google Map “Mashup”: Optimap, it attempts to solve the classic ‘Travelling Salesman’ problem, that is find the shortest route to take in an arbitrary list of locations, reordering the locations as appropriate. Doing this manually is tedious at best, but you can miss some useful shortcuts, it’s also no easy task for a computer to solve, but with some clever maths (more on the authors blog!), its possible for a computer to have a good stab at it.
Anyway try it out:Optimap
Only thing missing is import/export functions – wonder in fact if the author could push to get this integrated into the real Google Maps engine, that would be so cool!
(* actually I read about it in the Google Maps API group)