MapQuest Does Street Level Imagery
December 14, 2009 16 Comments
So yea, not a surprise.
As the name implies, 360° view provides fantastic panoramic views (360° horizontally and 160° vertically) of any given image within the 360 View coverage area (initially 30 cities and 15 suburbs across the United States with more to come). We have studied our industry, gleaning tidbits here and there, and polled our customer base in creating a simple, easy-to-use interface that fits seamlessly into the MapQuest mapping experience you have come to know and understand. Best of all, MapQuest 360 View “just works” without requiring any 3rd party player downloads.
Take that Bing Maps and your 3rd party player download. MapQuest works without any Silverlight player to get in your way… except of course it uses a 3rd party player called Flash. I suppose this plays into Adobe’s assertion that their 3rd party player download is included by default in many browsers by default. Still it looks good and appears to have been taken sometime last year (the light rail line isn’t running yet in Phoenix and most stations haven’t been built yet.
A view of University of Phoenix Stadium where you'll be seeing the true national championship; TCU vs BSU.
Now before you start going off an claiming this doesn’t matter, remember the real traffic numbers for the four main mapping sites:
Yep, Bing and Yahoo don’t add up to MapQuest’s reach. I think it is critical to get this functionality into their API before more companies abandon it for Google While traffic numbers trend down over the last 6 months, I’m not sure it is losing to Bing or Yahoo.
Carry on MapQuest!
Kansas, a band so great a state was named after them.
About James Fee
which is better? pepsi? coke? dr. pepper?
whichever is cheaper, i guess!
Where is that graph/data from?
http://www.compete.com
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Any idea why all the lines trend down. Seems odd. Does Compete pick up mobile access?
Recession? No one has money to care where the coffee shops are anymore?
Yea it’s the coffee shops for sure. Personally I’ve been buying more beans and grinding at home since I got run out!
Aggressive marketing of cheap GPS equipment?
Sudden distrust of online mapping after a rash of bad routing from Google?
Way to go, David.
It’s not http://maps.bing.com but http://www.bing.com/maps (the first is just a redirect), so I’m not sure you can count on those numbers.
Morten: Putting bing into compete doesn’t really show us much because compete can’t seem to parse out only maps section, it delivers the whole bing domain.
What is amazing about that is maps.google.com has more traffic than the whole bing.com domain.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/maps.google.com+mapquest.com+www.bing.com+maps.yahoo.com/?metric=uv&months=12
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James –
How do ESRI’s online maps compare to these numbers?
Flash == Silverlight
Its all the same.
They both suck since they aren’t 64-bit enabled in Windows, although Silverlight will win that install race (when it comes) since it can be deployed in a corporate environment via WSUS.
Rob: That’s a moot point. The moment your WebApp requires 64bit memory allocation to run, you are definitely doing something wrong.