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.

Internet firm Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) may replace its Geo-Platform with Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG), a move that could reduce its operating costs by about 2 percent to 5 percent, according to an analyst at Global Equities Research.

“Yahoo Geo-platform is lagging behind both Google and Microsoft Geo-Platform,” analyst Trip Chowdhry wrote in a note to clients.

Adena Schutzberg cuts to the chase:

There are so many errors in the IB Times article discussing the note, errors I fear are from the original note, I am very skeptical.

My Grandmother, bless her heart, always told me; “If you don’t know what you are talking about, keep your mouth shut!”.  Clearly that doesn’t apply to “analysts”.  To be fair, he did call Salesforce.com a “modern day Visi-Calc”. Wait, that wasn’t right…

• Skyhook Wireless and Sony are hooking up to give the next generation PSP some location capabilities.  Good news for Skyhook, but aren’t devices like the PSP and Nintendo DS on their way out?  I guess we’ll see this summer when everyone is playing the latest EA games on their iOS devices.
• Work with R?  Check out RStudio!  IDEs are usually hit and miss with me but this has enough awesome to warrant a download. (HT: PHXGeo)
• Protected Maps in Google Fusion Tables?  Yes please!  2011 may be the year of Google Fusion Tables[ref]oh and the iPad 2, right?[/ref]
• Google Maps labels look better, but why?  Justin again analyses how Google does this and compares it to Bing and Yahoo!.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you’ve got to be following Justin’s blog!
• IBM puts out a weird blog series on the “The Case Against Google Maps in IBM Cognos Reports” (parts two and three).  To me I’m left wondering where the content is on that case to use Esri map services.  They sum it up this way, “In solid Boolean logic: NOT Cognos BI AND Google Maps.”  Say whaaat?
• Lastly, Matt Kenny brings us the awesome that is TileStache.  Seriously now, why are we still using WxS and Esri ArcGIS Services?[ref]Sure, you can give me thousands of edge cases where such overhead is needed, but rarely does one need such things.  We need to break out of our bad practices and embrace the future.[/ref].  Read Matt’s blog and get cracking.  Bonus points for rolling TileMill and TileStache together!

Its Alright?

Rest assured that whilst Brickhouse may be gone, Fire Eagle itself lives and thrives within the Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group.  Fire Eagle has been, and will continue to be, a core component of Yahoo’s Geo Technology and User Location strategies and we’re committed to developing features, applications and support without interruption.

Fire Eagle and Pipes are two of Yahoo!’s better projects and hopefully the problems at Yahoo! won’t hurt their development.

Jerry loves GeoJSON

Yahoo! announced some updates to GeoPlanet including GeoJSON support.  Yahoo! seems much more quiet than most companies about their endeavors (Fire Eagle, GeoPlanet, Pipes) and I’m glad to see them improving given the pressures they are under these days.  I really like how GeoPlanet is organized and I hope it (and Fire Eagle and Pipes) continues to be improved and enhanced.  Plus not having to deal with XML is a huge bonus.  Now if ESRI can support GeoJSON with their RESTful API we’ll all be very happy.

The Y! Geo blog seems to be written in marketing speak, but hopefully that will change as time goes on.

Jerry Yang is ecstatic at the idea of GeoYahoo!

In simple terms, the Service allows you to look up the unique identifier – called the Where on Earth ID, or WOEID – for almost any named place on the Earth; it also allows you to resolve a WOEID you have received from a third party – such as Fire Eagleâ„¢ or Upcoming – to the place it represents.

The API is accessed via HTTP GET; the following examples can be cut-and-paste into a web browser to view the results (note that these links do not work properly with IE6):

Find the WOEID of a significant landmark:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘sydney%20opera%20house’)

Resolve a WOEID to a place:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2507854

Find the WOEID of a specific place:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘northfield%20mn%20usa’)

Obtain a range of WOEIDs that match a given place, ordered by the most likely:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘springfield’);start=0;count=5

Find the parent of a given WOEID (and return a detailed record):
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/638242/parent?select=long

Return the Placename for a given WOEID in a specific language (where it exists):
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘usa’)?lang=fr

To obtain the representation of a place in JSON format:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2487956?format=json

To obtain a list of geographies that neighbor a specific WOEID:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/12795711/neighbors

The Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog explains it as “a more elegant way to abstract the relationships of location, and unambiguously describe places in a permanent, language-neutral manner.”
One of the overused examples of a place in Arizona is the Grand Canyon so lets put that in the system and see what we get:

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(‘grand%20canyon’)

I like the hierarchy here: In the above example, Grand Canyons Village’s parent is the county of Coconino, whose parent is Arizona, whose parent is the United States. These relationships should help users get more information out of places than they did before.

Dan Catt has some details on his blog about WOEID and how Yahoo! is using it.

What are people doing for mapping on the poles if you want to create a web based map product for a client who is working in the Arctic and Antarctic?

Update: I should say I’m looking for hosted web maps services. Using my own IMS server or relying on one that isn’t hosted in a good environment isn’t an option.

On another note, I like where the ArcWeb team has taken ArcWeb Explorer. The new (well new to me) ArcWeb Explorer 4.0 is slick. Might have to stop by the ArcWeb teams island at the DevSummit and see where they are taking this thing.