Windows Live Maps Review
May 12, 2007 4:24 PM
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Windows Live Maps (previously Windows Live Local or Virtual Earth), is a free web mapping service provided as a part of Microsoft's Windows Live online applications services suite. It is accessible as a web 2.0 application. Windows Live Maps is based on existing Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft MapPoint, Virtual Earth and TerraServer. Upon its release in December 2005, Windows Live Local became the public face of the Virtual Earth platform.
Its strategy follows Microsoft harnessing Windows Live. This time does with a product that replaces the Virtual application Earth and that Integra geographic search with local searches of businesses and the possibility of establishing routes between two points. Its name? (Original which they are in Redmond), Local Live Windows and, surprise, works in Firefox.
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| View under Manhattan (New York) in Windows Live Maps |
The result at first sight is somewhat amazing. It combines shining technical aspects as we are the images with angle of 45º (Bird's Eye) and the quality of many locations (example) with a quite rough operation in navigators nonMicrosoft (to drag & to drop to hill horrors from Firefox in this Local Live Windows) and the fact that, as always, the areas available in principal are the cities of the United States, having left the rest of the world for more ahead.
This Local Live Windows promises in addition integration with MSN Messenger to work with shared maps (interesting a priori for the work in group if it lets make things powerful) and allows of entrance to create customized maps and to add notes such.
It will have much to walk to approach the success of Google Maps that has had the success to offer an API thanks to which it is already the base of numerous services in Internet based on geographical information. At the moment it has demonstrated that technically Microsoft is able to equal to anyone, is to see if he is able to provoke the same attention and to be sufficiently opened.
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