More Interesting Maps

August 24, 2005 1:20 AM Comments [8] Posted in Musings | Tools

I'd mentioned Amazon's foray into maps earlier, but they've gone even farther and launched http://maps.a9.com with "BlockView Images" for a bunch of cities. It's very Ajax-esque and while I think the dragging of the magnifying glass could use some work (I keep expecting it to work like Google Maps) it's a pretty interesting concept.

UPDATED: This is cool, adding A9 images to Google Maps.

Here's the lay of the land as I see it.

Interesting Map Sites

Amazing Map Fat Clients

http://earth.google.com

GPS Map Clients with DVDs

http://www.microsoft.com/streets

Map Sites That No Longer Serve a Purpose

http://maps.yahoo.com

Map Sites That Totally Missed The Boat But Are Still Used As Verbs

http://www.mapquest.com

Map Sites That Should Have Been Integrated with Another Map Site But Aren't For Whatever Reason I'm Not Privy Too But That's Still No Excuse

http://maps.msn.com

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Comments [8]

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Wednesday, August 24, 2005 6:44:20 AM UTC

oddly they have totally different street views from yellowpages.amazon.com.
check out 1001 west maude avenue,sunnyvale,ca in maps.a9.com, then search for micro focus in sunnyvale using yellowpages.amazon.com. Ignore the fact they have the address wrong and click through to the street view.
they must have done 2 drive-bys!

Ian

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 11:13:20 AM UTC

And Google joint to instant messengers:
http://www.google.com/talk/start.html
They release new services every week!

Keyvan Nayyeri

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 1:06:23 PM UTC

Wow, YAMS (yet another mapping site). Who knew that maps of all things would be the killer app of 2005?

Anyway, thanks for the link. It's condo-hunting time, so I've been become very proficient at Google Earth, Virtual Earth, Amazon Maps and I'll soon have to add this to the list..

Jeff Key

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 7:08:40 PM UTC

Don't forget about http://moon.google.com/

BTW, zoom in all the way. Hehe.

-Ryan

Ryan Farley

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 8:47:48 PM UTC

Does NASA World Wind count in the Amazing Fat Clients category? It's open source AND .NET....

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

Oran

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 11:10:54 PM UTC

I second the call for NASA World Wind... all C# and Managed DirectX, and c'mon, it's freaking NASA!

Jason Mauer

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 11:19:32 PM UTC

One more thing... there actually is one purpose for Yahoo Maps; you can display geolocated entries from an RSS feed using it. It can handle both latitude/longitude and street addresses... all you need to do is include the feed URL as a querystring parameter.

http://developer.yahoo.net/maps/index.html

The big thing that sucks about Yahoo Maps is the lack of support for embedding in another web page (among other things).

Jason Mauer

Monday, August 29, 2005 6:41:21 PM UTC

Have you ever heard of Tagzania? If never, take a look at http://www.tagzania.com/user/guercheLE