"(...) After admitting that she uses Google Maps, [new Yahoo CEO Carol] Bartz said Yahoo Maps isn’t as good as it should be because 'we haven’t paid any attention' to it.

CFO Blake Jorgensen, who resigned last week but is still on board, added that an online mapping service is very expensive to maintain, and that he doesn’t foresee Yahoo pouring significant additional investments into Yahoo Maps in the near future."

Ooops.

Strategy, politics or just a PR lapse? 

Google's recently released Latitude causes sort of a stir out there in the blogosphere.

Seems to work on both connected mobile handsets and desktops and it basically allows you to share your location with a set group of friends. Allow/Disallow: as simple or as complex as can be.

Brady Forrest comments that Latitude isn't tied to an application and only needs your GMail/GTalk contacts to work on. A slap towards the 200-pound social networks Facebook and MySpace: who if not them should have come out with a locate-a-friend-de-luxe version?

Besides Yahoo's announcement launching OneConnect almost exactly a year ago, CNET's Caroline McCarthy is quoted saying ...

“There’s a reason why no mobile socialnetworking company has broken out yet.
They haven’t found themselves — on a map, that is.”

How true this is! The maps haven't changed much since then - it's still "maps made for cars", and frankly — still the good ol' Navteq or Tele Atlas vehicle stuff, some house footprints manually added offshore.

Would you locate yourself on a bare bones street map or go for something much more sociable?

<END shameless selfpromo>

Yahoo! Maps rolled out an impressive update lately - we like the colorspace and symbols!
Alas, we can't resist ...

Left side image is Yahoo! Maps largest zoom level as it seems.
The red dots on our sample image on the right is POIs, shops, commerce, cultural sights ... not too pretty yet - but here they are.

See larger images ...

ctd' from "A brief history of online mapping"

In 2004 Google bought Keyhole, a company producing satellite imagery. Google Earth launched in January 2005 and immediately took off.

MapQuest was bought by AOL, making it the worlds first $1B dollar mapping company.
Though still popular, MapQuest lost it’s pool position to Google Maps which collects around 24% of all world-wide mapping traffic.

Still in 2004 all data was treamed from the mapping service to the user – until Paul Rademacher started the map mashup (he just wanted to show bay areas’ flats for-rent from craigslist.com on a simple map).

Continue reading "Map mash-ups are a game-changer" »