Looks like MSN Maps (aka Mappoint) is building a competitor to Google Maps.

Check out the Demo in WMV format. It’s pretty long but shows lots of interesting features.

Some of the features include:

  • Panning and zooming like google’s (but also with additional functionality including the use of the mouse scroll wheeel to zoom, keyboard keys like +/- to zoom and arrow keys to pan, a compass that you click and drag on to pan faster/slower, etc).
  • satellite photography like google’s
  • street names overlay onto the satellite images that are easier to read than the watermarks on google’s
  • local search integration with colored markers so you have the ability to overlay multiple different searches and identify the different locations based on the different colors (i.e. “steak houses” are marked with blue on the map and “starbucks” are marked with rid, etc). Results are updated as you pan on the map.
  • The ability to save locations to a notepad…a novel idea I like. This can be used to plan out your day/trip. You can then take the contents of that scratch pad and email it or insert it into your MSN blog. Links take you back to the map (not the location).
  • 45-degree angle high-resolution pictures so you can actually see the buildings, people walking down the street, cars, etc (there was a discussion about why they chose this resolution instead of going even more high rez). These are the things talked about the most for this product. We’ve been used to seeing top-down views from satellites due to terraserver, mapquest, etc. These pictures, however, were taken by planes flying over the city.

Overall, a very compelling product. We’ll see how well it is done in real-world tests since a demo shows you only what they want to show you :-)

The developers claim they will launch US first then try and go worldwide (so the existing mapping product will run in parallel). They also claimed compatability with both MSIE (no surprises here) and firefox but no other browsers (i.e. safari, etc).

I hope they also build it in a way to provide APIs for those wanting to build MSN Maps hacks. I know their Mappoint product has a SOAP API but it is a commercial (paid for) product so I don’t know if they’ll support these individual hacks like google plans to (not that this will stop anyone :-)

BTW, also in the video is a discussion about moetizing. One possible integration that they’re “thinking about” is whether they will integrate ads on top of the map (Starbucks is an advertiser and all starbucks may show up on the map and is clickable for a related search such as “magazine rack”).

UPDATE: This is quicker to read than sitting through that long video.

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