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MSN Virtual Earth Revealed
jeremyw writes "A day before its official launch, MSN Virtual Earth has gone live. MSN appears to have been inspired by Google Maps in this combination of local search and mapping. Virtual Earth introduces a number of interface enhancements to the now-familiar draggable aerial web map, such as the ability to zoom in using your mouse scroll wheel, and a Location Finder to determine your location to determine your real-world location "using Wi-Fi technology." Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble claims the site may not perform at full capacity until Monday."
Looking at London, i see a label with a massive expance of blank map around it. No London boroughs, areas, regions, anything. If i tried to find my house it wouldn't go very far. You can't even zoom in very far.
At least Google had a great service for the areas they had up, then expanded it to the rest of the world. The MS map seems to have poor support all round.
And setting aside the international support, this was very slow and seemed "clunky" compared to the Google interface. I do like the scrollwheel support and the use of the same images for various zoom levels, as you don't reload the map on every zoom.
These two examples point out another flaw. Within firefox, I can use the back button to return to slashdot from the google map. The MSN version is doing something that keeps my back button from working correctly. I have to use my browser history to return to slashdot.
Visiting the site makes my konqueror crash. Fair enough, googles version also doesn't work for konqueror, but at least it doesn't make it crash.
They both get their data from NAVTEQ. If you look in the lower right corner of MS Earth, you'll see "© 2004 NAVTEQ." In Google maps you'll see "© 2005 NAVTEQ."
So, they're using older vector data. They're using older imagery, too. For most places MS uses USGS DOQQs, probably from 1999. Google, for urban areas at least, uses more recent satellite imagery. But outside of urban areas, Google uses low-res Landsat imagery which is fairly useless for this application.
and i'm in Ontario as well. I had to give it more information than I would google but that wasn't a big deal.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
It appears that it is an integer rounding error. Notice how the MS lines line up exactly in the y direction, the x direction, or are exactly 45 degrees -- whereas Google lines are at the correct angle.
Well, the problem is that Microsoft's competition is based on leveraging prior successes - not by actually performing better in a new market. They don't win by being better than the competition, they win by throwing money at the problem until the competition can no longer keep up, and then once they own the market they just milk it like a cash cow. Look at IE - nothing but minor incremental bugfixes for about a decade, until all of a sudden Firefox comes along and IE is booming with new features.
Check out Google's campus from Google Earth:
http://catatonic.org/grafix/google-google.jpg
Now from MSN's product:
http://catatonic.org/grafix/msn-google.jpg
Pretty darn nice. Sorry for the folks in other parts who don't have good resolution in either product but for the SF Bay Area, MSN has the better satellite images (for now). The block I live on not far from the above shots was similarly clear. I could clearly see my car.
I think Microsoft did a great job with this site. This is the first version and it has all the features of google map. Even the hybrid mode they added a few weeks ago.
And on some areas (San Fransico, Los Angeles...) the zoom level is insane (2 or 3 times better than google's). You can nearly see people on the streets.
Finally there are cool innovative features like locate me. And it works really good.
I know this is slashdot so I won't go any further. But I do think that with a little more work this could be as good or better than google map.
Actually you can report the problem to google here.
:)
I reported errors in their maps before and those errors are fixed. So I believe they do process the error reports.
I think you mean TerraServer.
This new Microsoft service is not based on ActiveX, it is just HTML and JavaScript as is Google Maps.
The only part of it that uses ActiveX is the "Locate Me" option, and even that is optional, where ActiveX is not available it will simply use your IP address to look up your location.
Google Earth is a windows only client. But MSNVirtualEarth and Google Maps both work fine in Firefox on any platform.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
And they copied the most innovative part of Goggle maps - tile-based pre-built raster images to assemble dynamic ... While the rest of the GIS community was happily working to make incremental improvements to the old paradigm, Google innovated a new paradigm. MSN just copied it.
I have to say that you are wrong about this being a google innovation, these ideas were developed and online well before either google maps or msn's virtual earth. map.search.ch is still in many ways better than what google or msn are offering - i really like th keyboard navigation.
map.search.ch was launched in october 2004 google maps came later in 2005.
According the VE programmer:
Virtual Earth was live between 4 PM (PT) Saturday and 10 AM (PT) Sunday as part of our final cheks against our production systems; so we are now back offline as planned and be officially (beta) live on Monday. Our initial release is only limited to USA and we will follow up with other regions soon after that...
Chandu Thota's WebLog
uh, google maps doesn't have mouse zooming at all. There is a greasemonkey plugin that supports that feature, but surely you don't suggest that MS should follow greasemonkey?
Google earth does mouse zooming, so perhaps thats what you were talking about.
Google is just using a image pyramid which is a well documented algorithm. Using 1 pass over the map data, they can generate several levels of detail that can be retrieved efficiently over the network with minimal cpu usage. Rasteration of vector data on a per request basis is insane? Can you imagine what kind of supercomputer would be required if google maps did that now? I use Image pyramids at my work to do fast scaling/zooming/rotation of images, as it is quicker to parse an image map then it is to perform all the calculations on the fly.
Another interesting thing; google loaded in 5 seconds, after 3 minuttes the microsoft site gave up.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating