Small Fish, Big Pond

Bing just integrated a tool to their maps that polls flickr for geotagged images and overlays them against the streetview images in the same way photosynths overlay each other.

It’s not the most amazing thing but it’s nice to see a massive database like flickr be mined for locally applicable data like this.

In response Google just opened Google Maps Labs with some new features.
Is it just me or does Google Maps Labs have nothing worthwhile by comparison to what Bing released?

Drag a box and zoom is cool but I thought it already had that. I must be thinking of the millions of other map programs that do this normally. It reminds me of when Apple made a big deal adding Cut+Paste to the iPhone. It’s not a new feature, it’s just fixing an omission.

Aerial Imagery is nice when available but Bing has had that all along. Google is playing catch-up here.

Rotatable Maps only make sense on the GPS in my car, and even then it’s a bit disorientating. Besides rotating an image isn’t really “innovative”.

Where in the World game?! I’m going to stop here because this is absurd, when I’m looking for directions the last thing I want to do is get distracted playing a boring game. The only time I play virtual voyeur on Google maps or Google earth I know where i want to go.

It’s like MS and Google have switched places. Bing is testing some features that are new and could lead to alot of cool things. Google is giving us stuff that we’ve always had and expecting us to applause.