Maps

I just caught wind of a new startup named Everyscape from Greg Sterling's blog post. From the post, "... which is seeking to take ordinary photographs and knit them into a “3D” image display for cities." Coincidently, this happened on the coat-tails of my discovery of Photosynth, and my marveling at the potential of a long-tail virtual earth.

My first impression was Google Streetview on steroids, but their preview held an eerie similarity to the Photosynth demo. In fact, this seems to embody exactly what I foresaw for the future of Photosynth. Many ordinary images stitched into a scene that you can navigate. One interesting point is that they use scape artists as well as regular images.

Google has recently augmented their mapping solution by adding My Maps, a service that allows users to take a base Google map and add points, lines and polygons to it. Presumably this is a way to compete with some of the more advanced mapping solutions provided by Ask and Microsoft.

Both Microsoft's and Ask's mapping platforms are riddled with ultra cool features, are they just for show to try to one up the othe companies or are they real useful features.

Please share your thoughts here on what mapping features you like best and what features you would love to see.