Earth Showdown!

Well we've certainly seen some movement in the mapping space in recent months. MSN announces that their Virtual Earch is nearing completion, Google is updaing their acquired Keyhole package as Google Earth, and in the background NASA release version 1.3.1.1 of their open source WorldWind package on May 26th. How to keep up! It's the coolest thing, and for once you don't need to be an uber-geek to get the most out of it. This is something I can show my wife -- even my mother! -- and get an "ooohhh!" out of her. That's good technology! It wasn't long ago that online maps were tedious to navigate, and just not a fun/entertaining diversion. You could look up directions (which would often not exactly get you where you wanted to go), and just see an overhead map. The utility of locating any map almost instantly was a neat thing, but mostly to the geeks.

Microsoft Streets and Maps was a good effort. If you had the local space for it, you got nice maps, construction updates, routing, and other features in a zippy desktop interface. Google Maps took things to the next level though. Wow! Great maps, and totally online. This is a great site. I suppose I should mention TerraServer from Microsoft, but since moving to more of a business model, it just isn't as fun to use. I play with Google Maps just to explore.

The Keynote pacakge lets you do flybys and have even more fun exploring, but it wasn't really marketed to the masses -- it was a CNN toy. Google's "extreme makeover" of the product has made mapping even more cool. In the newest version, who wouldn't want isometric views of the buildings overlaid on the satellite maps? What a great way to get a feel for real cities. Pilots can learn about small airports, even getting a view of them "from the air" making it easier to recognize when they get there. If you are the type to say "I just can't figure out maps" then you need to take a look!

Now with MSN's Virtual Earth product it looks like the ante is being raised yet again. It sounds like it will be cross-platform (browser-based unlike Google's), and with real isometric building views, compared to Google's (apparently) vector building views.

I haven't played with World Wind yet, but the screens look nice. The Google and MSN offerings both support layering of information such as boundaries, business locators, parks, etc. This lets you create a customized map with only your specific points of interest. I have a feeling that World Wind may not have that kind of feature, but I'm interested to see as they seem to do a lot with 3D topology and natural events. It will be fun to play with them side-by-side.

MSN's offering isn't available (as far as I know), but Google's is in private beta. Keep your eyes open for them. Even if you don't want to buy them, the free online versions just keep getting better. Now I just need to figure out which GPS unit to choose for Father's Day! :-)