action online

It seems that the online maps arena is so competitive. Mapquest used to be the everyday word when you did not know your way around the neighborhood and Yahoo Maps was the next best competitor. And just as AJAX was starting to be used among modern web designers and developers, Google Maps was one of the first to capitalize on it making Google Maps popular right away and quickly followed up their market positioning move with satellite photography. Since then it has push all the others a step further. Here is what everyone else has been trying to do:

• Yahoo Maps, tried AJAX and there was a time that is had the old maps and the AJAX version in beta. Today, Yahoo Maps uses Macromedia Flash instead. As an advertiser, Yahoo Maps seems to be favorable as brand logos could be placed below maps where business establishments are present.
• Mapquest, although a pioneer in this business, they were one of the late ones to implement AJAX maps. One notable thing I noticed in Mapquest even in the past, for your wrong addresses, it still seems to come up with the address you were really looking for. I guess once nice feature it has right now is the clear distinct lines of boundaries of areas.
• Ask Maps has topography maps. I guess if you are interested in these matters, meteorologist, geologist, volcanologist might be interested in this and get turned on by looking at them. I think it is a cool feature as well. Their AJAX programming looks really tight. They even go into the small details of the fade-in image loading.
• MSN/Live Search Maps was one where I first saw photos of spots taken at street level for certain selected spots. They were basically simply a photo of a selected location. One feature I like about MSN right now is their areal photography view is not directly on top and comes in at an angle. And unlike all other maps, that are oriented to have North on top, in Live Search maps, you can spin it all around, and guess what? The angle of the perspective view in the areal view changes as well.

Now with all the others pushing hard to do this, what did Google Maps just recently do again?

Google Maps Street View

Watch the video on how it works:

Just a few months back, they had the traffic data, and now they have street view, a 3D 360 view where you can turn around and zoom in and out. I tested it out and gave it a spin. My neighborhood does not have it yet, so I tried bigger cities first starting with San Diego, downtown did not have it yet. So I tried Los Angeles, none also. I typed in New York, and there I saw it. I also saw it working in San Francisco. Looks really cool, and I guess we just have to wait and see it unfold everywhere else as even some of the basic features are just starting to unfold in other countries like in my home country the Philippines. I just tried out if they are aware of some of the cities already, and tried it on Quezon City. And it lands right on top of Iglesia ni Cristo near University of the Philippines Diliman. *LOL* The 3D 360 spin will help greatly I believe in getting a better picture of the environment so you won’t get lost at all. Checking how things look like before actually going to them.