During the Web 2.0 conference last month, Tim, Rael, and I had the opportunity to check out the new Yahoo! Maps. I was particularly gratified to see that they’ve rectified a lot of the usage problems with the previous iteration of Yahoo! Maps, and that they’ve absolutely kicked ass with the API. Last night the new maps site and the new APIs went live.
What’s new? The big news is that they finally have a dynamic map view that’s similar to that provided by Google Maps, but with some very nice improvements. They’ve got a sexy zoom control, and clever improvements to the usability of features and routes (trivial to build multi-point trips, create roundtrips, and use your saved locations). For Local, they have nifty features like geoRSS feed for searches, local, and traffic around locations. Most notably, though, the default view is Flash-based. There’s an Ajax version of the API available for the Flash-averse, but I think the more seamless control offered by Flash will prove too convenient to throw aside.
On the API front, there are huge changes. Huge. You can embed the Flash and Ajax maps components in your page, with the same use cases as the Google Maps Javascript API. But unlike Google (and this is a first) they have an official free API for geocoding. It covers the US and Canada, and I won’t be at all surprised to see Google-Yahoo! mashups as some of the first round of coding: using the familiar Google Maps API with the Yahoo! geocoder. But I wager Google Maps developers will be sorely tempted by the Yahoo! mapping component’s API–it’s easier to do more powerful (and elegant) things with Flash than with Ajax. You can do more with the Yahoo! APIs than you can with Google’s. And though it might be old news, I was impressed with the Excel component so you can build maps straight from Excel, no programming needed (example).
It’s interesting to note this prominently displayed term of use in their API documentation. Google has a version of the same clause. As the geowankers point out, GPS sensors + routing API + Google Maps + clever coding = your own in-car navigation, and that’s NAVTEQ’s bread and butter. If you look at the credit at the bottom right of the maps.yahoo.com images, they’re credited to both NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas (previously it was just NAVTEQ) whereas Google’s are just TeleAtlas. I suspect the stronger wording of this clause was a bitter pill Yahoo! was forced to swallow to offer API access to the more reliable NAVTEQ data:
You may use location data derived from GPS or other location sensing devices in connection with the Yahoo! Maps APIs, provided that such location data is not based on real-time (i.e., less than 6 hours) GPS or any other real-time location sensing device, the GPS or location sensing device that derives the location data cannot automatically (i.e. without human intervention) provide the end user’s location, and any such location data must be uploaded by an end-user (and not you) to the Yahoo! Maps APIs.
Legalese aside, this release is a major strike by Yahoo! I didn’t think their first maps API was anything to write home about, but they haven’t just played catch-up to Google with their second maps API. They’ve overtaken Google in functionality and in elegance. A much-needed offensive in the mapping wars. Next up … someone has to offer AdSense for locations so I can make money from my mashups …