Scott Hanselman

More Interesting Maps

August 24, 2005 Comment on this post [8] Posted in Musings | Tools
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Mapsa9I'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

GPS Map Clients with DVDs

Map Sites That No Longer Serve a Purpose

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

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

 

 

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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August 24, 2005 10:44
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
August 24, 2005 15:13
And Google joint to instant messengers:
http://www.google.com/talk/start.html
They release new services every week!
August 24, 2005 17:06
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..
August 24, 2005 23:08
Don't forget about http://moon.google.com/

BTW, zoom in all the way. Hehe.

-Ryan
August 25, 2005 0:47
Does NASA World Wind count in the Amazing Fat Clients category? It's open source AND .NET....

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
August 25, 2005 3:10
I second the call for NASA World Wind... all C# and Managed DirectX, and c'mon, it's freaking NASA!
August 25, 2005 3:19
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).
August 29, 2005 22:41
Have you ever heard of Tagzania? If never, take a look at http://www.tagzania.com/user/guercheLE

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.