April SearchSIG MapOFF was both informative and educational. Even though Microsoft missed the SearchSIG due to Seattle weather (Sunnyvale was rained in as well), and Ask.com Maps did not have any APIs, while 70% of the discussion rotated around APIs, the panel participants and the audience became quite involved in the subject. Yahoo!, which hosted the event in its Sunnyvale office, came prepared and announced satellite imagery on Yahoo! Maps beta (currently live) with worldwide coverage and better resolution in the United States than competing offerings. Jeremy Kreitler from Yahoo! Maps also spent a great deal of time on talking about Yahoo’s Maps API offering, which currently supports a variety of formats, including AJAX and Flash.
Andy Yang from Ask.com Maps presented what seemed to be the cleanest and most intuitive map interface, which had one killer feature – ability to change the directions provided to the user originally. While Navteq-supplied driving directions tens to favor large highways and busy intersections, the locals quite often know that those are rarely the best way around, especially if your trip happens to be during the commute hour. Ask.com Maps allows the user to reroute the map and driving directions by placing an additional marker on the map.
Thai Tran of Google Maps did not demo anything that the audience didn’t see before. However, the mashups created on top of Google Maps and Google Earth were quite impressive. Quite a few interesting factoids: while Google Maps is considered to be a prime example of AJAX at large, neither Thai nor his team at Google knew what AJAX was, neither was thinking about using a special technology or coining a term for it – the task was just to build a usable interface, for which JavaScript+XML combo seemed to work well. Also, Google team had all sorts of ideas when launching the first version of Maps, and one of the idea included real estate data from different sources such as Craigslist. When HousingMaps came along, Google Maps team was quite impressed – not only Paul Rademacher reverse-engineered the JavaScript and XML sent back to Google server, he also managed to come up with a working application over the weekend. As a result, Rademacher got an offer from Google.
Neither Yahoo! nor Google currently impose any practical limits on Maps API usage. There’s a 500,000 limitation in Google’s terms of services, but Thai Tran characterized it as "lawyers being overprotective", not Maps team actually willing to keep their product usage locked up.
The idea of acquiring mapping providers, brought up by a gentleman in the audience, did not seem to generate enough enthusiasm. First off, Navteq is a $4-5 bln company, and even if money was not an issue, the company’s current value is based on the fact that it sells the data to both Yahoo! and Google as well as numerous other companies. Buying the company for that amount just to ruin its revenue stream and generate exodus of existing clients to the competition might not be a wise business decision.
Every company in the discussion placed a lot of value on existing APIs. The obvious trap for third-party developers, of course, is having the company commit to the API. Ask.com Maps did not have any APIs to speak of, but both Google and Yahoo! pledged their support for "freezing" released APIs and versioning always present in their Web services releases. A9’s BlockView feature and Windows Live’s bird-eye view was agreed to generate a lot of "wow" factor, which faded quickly, for being barely usable. Neither company is too concerned with the foreign governments’ cries for disclosing the sensitive data – if Ghana or whoever has concerns about their national security objects exposed on satellite maps, they can dial NavTeq number and deal with them, while Google and Yahoo! got indemnity from their satellite imagery providers specifically for such cases.
