Google, Microsoft And Yahoo Unveil Upgrades To Maps
“During the past week internet’s three major players have made headlines over making impressive upgrades to their mapping programs.”
Microsoft Live Maps Gets Impressive Improvements
Microsoft this week rolled out a slew of upgrades to its Windows Live Maps, including a major tweaks to some of its Virtual Earth 3D cities (Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix), that introduces a number of innovative features and enhancements to the online mapping service.
Users can now enjoy the impressive enhancements to Live Maps; they can now easily export their collection of maps in a variety of GPS formats that are compatible with just about any device: KML, GPX, and the ability to subscribe to GeoRSS feeds for a certain region.
The Live Maps team states that GPS compatibility was one of the most oft-requested features. “You can now plan your trip on the web by creating a Collection of Waypoints, and then use the Export feature to take them with you on the road,” reads the blog post.
But the Live Maps/Virtual Earth blog has a lot more comprehensive list of cool new features.
Perhaps the vital in this update, is the integration of Keyhole Markup Language, or KML. KML is the language employed to mark up personalized Google Maps—and now you can easily import your personalized map marks into Live Maps.
Another great improvement to Live Maps includes — traffic information that is now more accurate; this is credited to Microsoft’s recent acquisition of ClearFlow, which predicts traffic on side streets, and traffic info is now available for more cities. With this, users can now have the option to select a better route based on traffic while collecting driving directions.
Watching The World In 3D
Similar to Google Maps, Live Maps has offered a bird’s-eye/satellite view for some time now (in addition to standard 2D view). But a matchless thing that Live Maps has over Google Maps is 3D view, complete with pretty 3D renderings of buildings and roads. The Live Maps team unveiled “version 2” of 3D view with this slew of updates, which is currently limited to a few select cities: Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver, and Phoenix.
According to the Virtual Earth/Live Maps blog, version 2 supports 3D-map video tours, which includes higher-resolution textures and smooth rendered trees, as well as “thousands more buildings” from inside the cities all the way out to the suburbs.
It also offers improved directions and traffic information, and also one-click directions that change the route on a map based on what direction you are coming from among a plethora of other things.
“Hundreds” other cities will further get enhanced 3D view by the end of this year, although 3D compatibility is still limited.
These enhancements make it a powerful competitor to other popular mapping services (namely Google Maps), although Live Maps could still benefit from more mindshare from the general Internet-using public.
Yahoo Maps Adds More Pictures And Extra Zoom
Determined not to be left out of the map fun fray, Yahoo has made its largest update to its imagery database since Yahoo Maps began. The Yahoo Maps and Local blog made an announcement today that they are adding more enhanced imagery to their maps.
In their broadest update so far, Yahoo states they have improved the breadth and the depth of their photographic coverage; most of the pictures are aerial views.
Almost a great deal of the update comprises of the US content, since adding on global images for a while now, Yahoo is ready to focus on pushing out updated content for its US maps.
The background data for a handful of states including California, New York, and Oregon has been improved, including a few more states from the Midwest. For genuine state maps, the color and clearness has been upped. If you wish for to get a closer look at your map content, the Yahoo maps now zoom two levels deeper for aerial and satellite imagery for hundreds of cities in the US. That indicates more detail, and eventually more useful map mashups.
Google Maps Street View Marching Forth To Australia
The Australian Fights Back
The Australian reports yesterday, that Google is taking its Street View to Australia. Unsurprisingly, privacy campaigners in Australia are as outraged as they were here.
Although Google has fought back the project, the internet company retracted when The Weekend Australian requested the personal details and addresses of the group’s key figures to allow the paper’s photographers to take pictures of their homes. “Providing those details would be completely inappropriate,” said Google spokesman Rob Shilkin.
He said Street View only carried imagery “that anyone can already see walking down a public street”.
“While Microsoft and Yahoo are improving on features, Google is busy squabbling with privacy pundits in Australia.”