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The View from Above - Online Mapping |
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When you are planning for a trip, you can’t always see what neighborhood a hotel is located in. You really aren’t sure whether it is near a shopping mall, if it has a view of the water or if there are many restaurants near by. You may also be curious what kind of neighborhood some one lives in or what their house looks like. The only way to figure this out has been to ask someone or drive by yourself. With the advent of the Internet and some of the latest mapping websites we now have some incredible clarity on the world that we live in.
The pioneer for the Internet maps was Mapquest. Mapquest changed the way you got directions. Instead of asking someone for directions and trying to interpret their directions or going to AAA to get maps, you now had the ability to type in the beginning and end address and get an overview map, turn by turn maps and instructions in a matter of seconds. As evolutionary as it was at the time it seems so archaic to the map websites of today
 
Google changed Internet search when it launched in 2000 and it changed the Internet mapping when it launched Google Maps (maps.google.com) in 2005. Google was the first to allow you to drag the map without having to refresh the page and it was the first to integrate satellite images into the maps. Now Mapquest, Yahoo Maps (maps.yahoo.com) and Google Maps all feature the Satellite view and the map dragging feature. All the web sites start with the regular map view, to view the Satellite images you can click on Satellite or Aerial. The feature that makes this most incredible is the view called Hybrid, which overlays the map onto the Satellite view to give you complete detail of the satellite image. Google recently expanded their map offering to the entire world. Now you can zoom in on the streets of India just as easy as you can Arlington. To go even further, Google was the firs to offer the ability to “fly” through a 3D Map with its Google Earth web site (earth.google.com). This allows you to start from outer space and zoom in to look around buildings, change your elevation and view of the landscape. Google Earth provides amazing detail and an incredible experience for exploring new places or looking at places that you have visited from a different perspective.
Google continues to expand it’s maps offering with maps of Mars (mars.google.com), a map of the Moon (moon.google.com – IF you zoom into the max on the moon you see something amazing), maps and planning of transit systems, and I am sure a few more. They also recently introduced a new feature called My Maps. My Maps allows you to customize maps by marking your favorite places, drawing on the map, adding your own text, photos and videos. You then have the ability to publish your map to the web and share with your friends and family.
 
The latest new comer to the mapping business is Microsoft (maps.live.com or local.live.com). In my opinion they now have the best solution available. They have the standard features that I mentioned above such as map dragging and the hybrid satellite view, but they also have a feature called Birds Eye view. This is an amazing feature which consists of photos taking from airplanes at about 1000 feet. These pictures are all stitched together and overlaid with the map for one continuous picture with incredible detail. You can see the windows in houses and the cars in the driveway. You can also choose the angle of the view. Therefore you can see all four sides of a building. To take the detail to an even greater level they also have a 3D view of certain cities around the country (the Boston area is one of them) like Google Earth. In addition, they also have a feature called locate me, which will pinpoint your current location on the map. The latest for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft is traffic. All of these offer an overlay of current traffic conditions onto their maps. |
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