This is an important step of Microsoft's Virtual Earth improving its branding awareness and could also potentially lead to more value added features to live local search. Virtual Earth comes later than MapQuest, Yahoo maps, and Google Maps, but it does has some nice features like 3-D view, 3-D building model, birds eye view, and my favorite feature Scratch Pad where you can store your favorite locations of restaurants, stores, and so on under different categories. This way you don't have to type in addresses you may check on the map from time to time and you can also conveniently share interesting locations with your friends through email or blog posts. It also showes real time traffic data and road incidents, which could be viewed on your cell phone or GPS to optimize your driving. The push pin is a cute tool too to enable you to mark any location where there is no valid address. There are lots of aspects that Virtual Earth maps needs to improve too though. For example, once I check the driving direction. The route Virtual Earth gave me looks optimal and shorter than the the one I got from Google maps, however in reality the shorter route is mostly through very narrow streets with lots of stop signs. Obviously, the "convenience" of the the streets that are picked for the routing is not weighted enough in Virtual Earth. By the way, if you are interested you can try out the Virtual Earth plugin for MovableType. It's fun to play with the 3D map on your blog.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
