Zmarties

Mashups using Microsoft's Virtual Earth have been slow to arrive - probably because although the API may be easier to use, the underlying mapping experience is much poorer (and noone really wants to tie their application yet to what was obviously a very rushed beta).

In an effort to kick start things, Microsoft's arms-length developer site organized a competition, offering a $1000 first prize, for mapping applications developed using their API.

The results are now available, with the top prize going to

• MapStats which shows where website visitors come from. This rather neatly works around the severe limitation of Virtual Earth in that it only covers the USA in any level of detail, by not needing to show much detail! Since most websites get visitors from around the world, a world level view does just fine.

Honourable mentions are also made to

• CREMaps, which would appear to be a property locator (but I could not get it to show me any results). It also has what I assumed was the (otherwise missing) map scroll control (containing arrows pointing in the 8 compass directions), but which turns out to be simply a branding logo.
  
• Zoom to Hotels which presumably allows you browse hotels, but which failed to show me any map (getting a Javascript error instead).

It's apparent there is a sharp drop off in quality with these second placed entries. Perhaps they work better in IE rather than the Mozilla browser which I have installed.

(I feel that the competition may have shot itself in the foot - as well as the first prize, there were other lesser prizes offered to the "first 25 entries to arrive" - which rather makes a quickly coded but poorly produced entry a worthwhile proposition).