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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.
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.
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.
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 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.