InsideGoogle

Yahoo Releases Newer, Better Maps Service

Yahoo has put out a new version of Yahoo Maps, and, just to be different, it uses Flash instead of the all-the-rage AJAX. Marc Orchant discusses it.

A few thoughts:

• You can drag the maps with your mouse, a seeming requirement in this day and age that almost no one was doing a year ago.
• You can zoom with the scroll wheel, or by double-clicking, something MSN Virtual Earth does, but not Google Maps.
• The back button actually works, which is kind of annoying. Google and MSN have made me used to hitting back and not moving backwards in the map, which is good, since who in the hell wants to do that?
• It seems pretty fast, but not faster than Google or MSN.
• Its a good release, but the bar has been set so high that I’m not sure if its enough. There are a few rough edges that need to be fixed, but without satellite views, they don’t have anything better than the others, and they don’t have that one cool thing the others do have.

UPDATE: Jef says, “Actually Yahoo released both Flash and AJAX APIs. The AJAX one looks functionally equivalent to Google’s, except they also have a geocoding API which Google does not”. Still, Yahoo didn’t release AJAX and Flash versions of their sites, but left it open to others to develope versions. Google may “only” have one API, but others have remixed it into a Flash version anyway.

November 3rd, 2005 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Yahoo, General | 3 comments