Santa Tracker has been a tradition for 57 years whereby the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) sets up a Santa Tracker online where you can track Santa online and now Google has also gotten into the holiday spirit, or competition, and launched its own Santa Tracker.
The NORAD has tracked Santa since 1955 and it recently replaced Google Maps with Microsoft's Bing Maps on its website. NORAD Tracks Santa has an App for iOS and Android and Santa tweets updates. The app is also filled with all kinds of historical and scientific data. If online tracking isn't good enough for you, call 1-877-HI-NORAD. A NORAD staff member will tell you Santa's exact location. Operators are available from now until 3 a.m. Dec. 25.
Now Google has unveiled its own Santa Tracker which uses its own Google Earth and Google Maps products which means you get two Santa tracker options to choose from starting Christmas Eve. Click here for Google's Santa tracker website.
"While we've been tracking Santa since 2004 with Google Earth, this year a team of dedicated Google Maps engineers built a new route algorithm to chart Santa's journey around the world on Christmas Eve," VP of Google Maps and Google Earth, Brian McClendon, wrote on the Official Google blog this week.
Google's Santa tracker also has some games. The Santa Racer game lets you navigate Santa's sleigh through a track and collect presents and the Present Drop game lets you drop presents into moving chimneys. There is also a feature that allows you to input information for a friend so that Santa will call them to or send them an audio message via email.
The NORAD Tracks Santa website attracted 18.9 million unique visitors from 220 countries and territories during December 2011.
This year, the program had more than 1 million likes on Facebook and nearly 97,000 followers on Twitter days before the tracking operation got under way.
