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VirtualEarthMaps/FirstImpressions

Yesterday (July 25, 2005), Microsoft launched its competitor to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps: [WWW]Virtual Earth. As Jon Udell wrote in [WWW]Jon Udell: MSN Virtual Earth, Google Maps, and AJAX deep linking, "the blogosphere will soon sort out the relevant differences in terms of interactive controls, map coverage, and APIs". I started playing with it yesterday and this morning, trying to figure out both the out-of-the-box features of Virtual Earth but also how to use the API to make maps of my choosing (as [WWW]I have done with Google Maps and Yahoo maps.)

My first impression is that Virtual Earth is roughly executed now, although it does have some potentially cool features (including the "locate me" function that tries to figure out where you are by proximity to nearby WiFi networks.) Based on the maps alone though, I didn't see any reason to switch from Google maps to VE at this point.

Nonetheless, I thought it possible that the programmability of Virtual Earth might make it a winner I was surprised that it took me a while to finally track down some tutorials on how to create my own maps. (I have still to find some good documentation.) The tutorials I found are all on the [WWW]Via Virtual Earth - Homepage, home of [WWW]one Dr. Neil Roodyn. I've looked through:

With this documentation, I did manage to do a bit of copying and pasting to [WWW]a VE map centered around my office building and [WWW]a map with one pushpin. I tried to get the maps to work in my wiki: [WWW]VirtualEarthMaps. The map shows up in Internet Explorer but not in Firefox....I don't know whether it's a problem with the map, one of the browsers, or MoinMoin's stylesheet at this point....

It's too early to expect much in terms of interesting applications of Virtual Earth right now. The one demo I saw using the API is clearly a proof-of-concept: [WWW]Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Hacking MSN Virtual Earth - Seattle Movie Finder is a demo that worked for me on Internet Explorer 6 (on Windows) but not on Firefox.

At this time, I don't see the point of spending any more time looking at Virtual Earth until it's had time to mature. In the long term, it would be great for end-users to have tools that would let one use any one of the map services out there without any extra effort....for now, I'll still primarily with Google Maps.

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