As part of Yahoo!’s commitment to creating deeply personal digital experiences, we have been reprioritizing our current portfolio of mapping products to refocus on a great consumer Mapping and Local Search experience.

So there you go, finally Yahoo! Maps API is going away.  Seems like just a couple years ago, Yahoo! was one the most prolific GeoAPI companies.  Now they are telling you to go look at OviMaps which might be just as unused as Yahoo!’s own APIs.

Jerry Yang seems still excited about Yahoo!’s chances though.

Thanks for visiting Yahoo! Now go find your APIs somewhere else.

• TileMill – If you haven’t heard about TileMill yet, clearly you aren’t on the Internets.  One of the biggest issues with creating maps online is you usually either needed a bug bulky desktop application to style them, or you had to go all ninja on notepad.  Either way you end up hating yourself which is never good on a Friday.  TileMill leverages Carto for styling which uses CSS (CSS for map creation has been a huge goal of mine for years).  CSS to me is a natural way to style maps unlike AXL, SLD and MapFile.  All this cartography greatness is rendered with the awesome Mapnik.  Right now you need to stop how you are styling maps and move to TileMill, there is no other choice.  Look at the awesome people are already creating.
• I’ve been called a Flex/Flash hater (Actually I’ve been called worse, but I can’t repeat it on the Internet), but clearly Flex is here to stay for web mapping.  We’ve seen some APIs from proprietary vendors, but if you want to roll in the open/free/beer crowd, you need to check out OpenScales.  Matt Sheehan has a good overview for open source developers that want to use open source for a web mapping front end, but not OpenLayers.
• Lastly geographika ponders if HTML5 will change how we map raster graphics.  I embrace that new world and hope it gets here sooner than later.

Enjoy your Friday and weekend folks!

I talked a little bit on the WeoGeo blog last week about how we were [very focused on content management](http://blogs.weogeo.com/jamesfee/2010/03/09/weogeo-is-content-management/). Yea, very sexy stuff… But what I think it highlights is the way that we can share our data with each other. Getting your data “into the Cloud”, whatever that means these days, and then using it as much as possible gives you the best return on your investment. One thing that did come up at the FedUC in February was the huge adoption of ESRI’s ArcGIS Online Map Services among users. Using these great free services as backdrops to your mapping content gives you a great starting point. But how you can integrate your geo-content into them is critical. Making it as easy and simple to do is how you’ll be able to leverage your data.

### The “Map Sandwich” ###

ESRI’s cartography blog of all places [has the key](http://blogs.esri.com/Support/blogs/mappingcenter/archive/2009/07/13/the-map-sandwich.aspx) to showing where data vendors (and just all around geo-Joes) can leverage their datasets in this new ecosystem of free web services. Now the blog post focuses on the cartography aspects of this mashup, but the huge takeaway here is that you can easily integrate your data into these free services in ways that your users/customers can leverage easily. What users want is to quickly integrate your data into their ecosystem. This means they want to consume them on their terms, not yours. Companies that successfully integrate with the Google, the Microsoft and large GIS vendors such as the ESRI, will see great consumption of their data. Those that create their own private data sharing sites or web services will see their fortunes decline, like Paul says.

### A Window into the Future ###

I’ll tell you right now who I see fitting perfectly into this “Map Sandwich” world, Brian Flood’s Arc2Earth. Take a look at his demo app, “[Tax Parcel Search - Westfield, NJ](http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=http://demos-arc2earth.appspot.com/a2e/viewers/apps/westfield_parcels_mapplet.xml)”. What is really cool about this demo app is that Brian has a [link to the API](http://demos-arc2earth.appspot.com/a2e/viewers/apps/westfield_api.html) that makes it happen. He based this API on some draft standards so it should be really easy to integrate into just about any application out there, but the chocolate syrup and cherry on top is his ArcGIS Server REST API Compatibility. Now, he still hasn’t released this publicly (at least that I can see), but it means that any data you create using his Arc2Earth API will be easily consumable in the ESRI ecosystem natively. No wacky WMS or WFS for ESRI users, this stuff will be copy and paste stupid easy.


Customers want this integration and it just isn’t ESRI users. We can sit on our high horse all we want and talk about open standards, but in the trenches people with money don’t have time for the OGC and others to get their act together (and even then they could care less).

>”Give me a web service that integrates into my ArcCatalog natively and I’ll buy”

That simple.

>”I’m using the ESRI Flex API and want to use your dataset.”

Here is the ESRI REST URL, have at it.

### Give Me Some of that Good Data-as-a-Feature ###

We should be looking at these Data-as-a-Feature services as opportunities to get our data into the hands of those creating applications. A quick look at the [ESRI Mashup Challenge](http://www.esri.com/software/mapping_for_everyone/api/mashup.html) shows that there are [tons of very useful apps](http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=72BF1CF05A4DAD7E) screaming to integrate your data layers into them. You just need to make sure you provide the meat and let ESRI handle the bread and lettuce (maybe a little bacon too).


### Bottom Line ###

So the above example is “ESRI Centric”, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid for EVERYONE. If your online geo-content isn’t in formats or services that can easily be integrated into popular mapping APIs and libraries, your data is not going be easily used. For the consultant, if you can’t deliver you data to your clients quickly and easily, they’ll look elsewhere for services (integrating with Drupal, SharePoint, whatever). For data providers, if I can’t grab your data and throw it into my OpenLayers mapping application or Silverlight API app by cutting and pasting lines of code, I’ll probably not use your data at all. You’d better start thinking this way because the landscape has changed, work with web services or be out of work. The writing is clearly on the wall, pay attention.

Brooklyn Decker – Sports Illustrated 2009 Swimsuit Model (Link is probably NSFW)

I’m not sure what happens under that hat with the route, but I’m sure it is magic! I’ve tried to piece together the route from both runs, but I’m at a loss.