Zmarties

MSN have launched Virtual Earth - their attempt to catch up with Google Maps.

Having tried it out for a few hours, I think they've generally missed. There are a few areas where they exceed the capabilities of Google Maps, but these are outweighed by those where they fall short.

The capability that is likely to get the most press is the fact that they show the USGS colour data at full resolution (ie at the resolution that Google Earth uses, not the reduced resolution that Google Maps currently displays). However, outside of the USGS colour areas (around 30+ US cities), they only show the black and white USGS data - which is a very poor substitute for the sometimes lower resolution, but coloured photos that Google uses. Google also has detailed coverage for many cities throughout the world, whereas Virtual Earth is limited to detailed data in the USA only.

A possible other reason to prefer VirtualEarth is it has a larger part of the screen given over to the map, since it does not reserve space alongside the map for search results.

The list of areas they fall short of Google Maps is longer:

• This is an extreme US centric launch - there is no attempt to provide photo data yet for the rest of the world, beyond the 1 pixel per km NASA Blue Marble image, and the "road map" view does not show any road data outside of the USA (showing just limited place name data).
  
• Keyboard navigation is harder with Virtual Earth - no use of pageUp/pageDown to move the map in big chunks (but I do like the fact that the scroll wheel can be used to zoom)
  
• Virtual Earth uses large, opaque, and ugly controls for zooming and scrolling
• Bringing up help places a pseudo popup window in front of the map - so you can't view help and the map at the same time
• Unfortunately the Virtual earth view of the world is flat - you cannot scroll west from the USA, but must scroll east to get to anywhere else
• The distance scale shows miles only - no metric measurements
• It is not possible to scroll around the whole world at a particular zoom level - when the data runs out (generally when you leave the USA) the system simply locks you from scrolling anymore in that direction, rather than showing you the data at whatever resolution it may have
  

Virtual Earth comes with what they call an API - which simply means that they have documented the URL format used to bring up a page at a specific location and zoom level etc. Unfortunately the URLs use the pipe character "|" when constructing the URLs - I've always considered this an invalid character (though the RFC may be ambiguous in this respect), and I know of plenty of tools which will not cope with such URLs - wikis for example, which often use the pipe character to separate a URL from the label a link will use. It's worth noting that its possible to separate the latitude from the longitude in the URL using a comma instead of the pipe character, but they really need to remove the pipe character altogether.