Google Maps or Windows Live Local? You decide!

I was preparing for a presentation I’m doing on Friday, when I got totally sidetracked in the maps world. I never really looked much at Windows Live Local before, but it has some pretty cool features. I always knew how neat Google Maps is, it has long been one of my favorites for viewing sattellite imagery if I don’t want to take the time to load Google Earth. But while looking for good examples of Mashups, I came upon FlashEarth.com.

FlashEarth is a mashup of Windows Live Local and Google Maps sattelite view. Often the photos are the same. However, at times they’re very different. FlashEarth allows you to flip back and forth between the two with a single click. There’s no frills at all. No search, no bookmarks, no features at all. Just access to the two sites and the ability to flip between them. Oh yeah, and the ability to grab permalinks to the map you’re looking at. Pretty quick to use, and best of all, NO ADS. In my mind, it’s very education friendly for the purpose of linking to.

Here’s a quick side by side of the exact same location. Both screenshots were taken from the FlashEarth site, the first is Google Maps and the second is Windows Live Local.

Google Maps

WIndows Live Local

The photos are of the Paris Hotel and Casino, which is where I stayed last weekend while in Vegas with some friends. As you can see, the photos are pretty darn close, but obviously they are not the same. Note the slightly different angle and the extra traffic in the Google shot. They also are colored very differently. To my eye, the Windows Local Live looks a little more ‘real’, but almost so real that they look recolored. Either way, it’s nice to have options and I really liked how easy FlashEarth was to bounce back and forth between the two programs.

This is the point where I really started to get distracted though. It seems as though there are some places in the country that Windows Live Local has extra sattelite imagery for. And not just from the top facing down, these images are from a 45 degree angle, which gives you an entirely different perspective. They call it the Bird’s Eye View. There’s a short list of places that have these images and unfortunately Chicago isn’t one of them. The interface is incredibly clunky and it was a royal pain to move around it. But the fact that you could actually change the perspective from which you are looking at objects makes it incredibly cool.

Check out the photos below. They’re all of the Paris, but this time, you’re basically flying around it and looking at it from different perspectives. Some people have told me "But you can do this with Google Earth!" Actually, you can’t. You can rotate the globe, you can move around the map, but the photos themselves are two dimmensional. Rotating the globe is like taking a photo in your hand and spinning it around. If you have a photo of your family at Disney World, no matter how many times you spin that photo around, you’ll never be able to see what’s directly behind where your family is standing. The Bird’s Eye view let’s you do just that. Basically you can see the map from completely different perspectives. So in the screenshots below, you see the hotel, from every angle. In some angels, the Eifel Tower is blocking the pool, yet in other angels you can see it just fine.

As I said before, there’s only about 10-15 areas that have the Bird’s Eye View available, and using it is kind of a pain, but at the same time, it’s a great way to see objects on the map in a lot more detail. I’m sure that looking at Niagra Falls from all four directions will be much more interesting than just having the overhead shot of it. Here’s to hoping that they keep adding more imagery and expanding the areas that have that view available!

Facing South