Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

MSN’s new beta of Virtual Earth seems like a better solution to mapping than Google maps, but you’re about to see just how much better it actually is. We’ll use the Amazon.com Corporate Headquarters as our example here, which is located currently on 12th Ave. S. in Seattle Washington.

Resolution:

MSN VE lets you get at least three times closer to your target than google maps:

Labelling:

MSN Virtual Earth seems to know more about what a property is than Google Maps:

Cool Interface:

Virtual Earth has a cooler semi-transparent overlay at the top, compared to Google’s blase and clunky “one thing after another” approach:

Not to mention that MSN Virtual Earth also has built in “locate me” and blogging features. Wow! aThese are just my first impressions, but it seems like Microsoft has built a Google-Maps killer!

Update:

MSN Virtual Earth is down? At least, this morning, it’s not responding to ping:

Pinging virtualearth.msn.com [207.46.159.135] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 207.46.159.135:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

For more on MSN Virtual Earth check these out (from Scoble):

• radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/24.html#a10738
• spaces.msn.com/members/virtualEarth/
• blogs.msdn.com/cthota/archive/2005/06/30/434508.aspx

Check out Google Maps:

Goole Map of Seattle

The interface has changed ever-so-slightly. There are now buttons for satellite versus regular maps:

The Boneyard, where planes go to die