Monday, July 25, 2005

MSN in the map business

somehow i feel like a carteographic wannabe seeing how my posts seem to be about maps these days....

msn has jumped into the mapping world with virtual earth. there are a couple of things that make this service nifty. first off i figured out you can zoom using your middle scrolling wheel. i love the wheel. (did you know you can open a link in a new tab in firefox by clicking the link with the wheel?) it is slightly slow, but a good use of the wheel in my opinion. second is a service that google maps also has, but i didn't realize it had it until i tried virtual earth. you can overlay the road map with the satellite image. pretty cool when you overlay new construction since the roads aren't there on the satellite yet. google maps is still better in the contrast on the satellite photos though.

2 comments:

forkev said...

firefox link mousewheel click is my new best friend. thanks so much for pointing that out.
it's interesing how the big bad MS is not far behind any cutting edge technolgy, but they have yet to really pioneer anything; i think of them as a steamrollwer, stealling technology, paying the patent infringement fees, buying the company, and moving on. i wonder how long until they cut a deal with google so it'll be msn/google.

k2h said...

I have my hopes for GE / Google but I doubt that will happen =)