Google launched their Google Maps beta today, and it’s impressive. I’ve had a cursory look, and it seems they’ve done a good job of abstracting out clutter while still giving a good sense of major roads, rivers, trails, and rails.

But the thing that really grabs me is the ability to “fly” around the map without forcing the page to re-load. Google has been making some great strides in this area, first with GMail*, which quickly snaps through most of its functions without forcing you to wait for a reload, and now with this mapping ability that permits zooming and panning without a new page. I hope we see more and more of these types of Web applications. Reloading saps productivity, causing delays while the page reloads and jumps around.

Back to maps: Yahoo! Maps also does a good job. While they don’t have the same level of page responsiveness that Google offers, they do have very high-quality contextual information, including nearby restaurants and other businesses, plus they now have real-time traffic (but in a somewhat hard-to-read style, I have to say.) I love using Yahoo’s “get local” feature to find nearby restaurants when I’m in another city.

On the other hand, if you’re taking a drive, your priority is the quality of the directions. Since Google, Y!, and old standby MapQuest (which is looking fairly shabby and ad-choked in this company) all get their turns data from the same company, I doubt there’s much difference in that respect.

I wonder what Google will tackle next?

* On the bizarre off-chance that anyone reading this wants a GMail account but doesn’t yet have one, just send an e-mail to jsp@ (this site) and I’ll hook you up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Geekery.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.