“Herein lies the problem with Yahoo! Maps: the designers focused too much on “decorating” and not enough on “communicating”. For example, it seems that making the highways look attractive was a far greater priority than simply making New York City’s city label legible. Or look at the city “dots” used on Yahoo! Maps: the focus was clearly on making pretty-looking city “dots”, instead of making city “dots” that actually communicate information, such as city population.”
An excellent comparison. This puts into words what most people only feel about the three providers’ map tiles. I could tell you I far prefer Google’s style, but I don’t know that I could articulate exactly why as well as the author.
Sort by MAGIC
The Google Reader team added a new feature last week that allows you to sort feed items “by magic.”
It’s the only way I’ve been browsing my “All Items” feed for the past week, it’s phenomenal. It ranks items you’ll like based on your previous “likes” and items you’ve shared. It’ll get more accurate over time, too. I don’t know if it factors the item’s age into its rank, but hopefully it sorta ignores that and ranks anything that remains unread. I tend to ignore my feeds for days in a row, so the unread items pile up fast. I wouldn’t want to miss anything that Reader claims I’d love just ‘cause it’s old.
Google has released a fancy new online drawing tool for digitizing in 3D buildings for Google Earth.
You pick from a preset group of locations and it loads in oblique aerial photos (so you can see the shapes of the buildings and pull their 2D footprints into three dimensions.
Google Wave was announced a few days ago.
It’s a new group collaboration and sharing tool made by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers behind Google Maps. The demo starts at around 7 minutes. These Google folks never cease to amaze with their wizard-like abilities to build products. Wave uses HTML 5 and V8 to advance browser capability to the level of desktop apps. It’s hard to believe that everything they’re doing in this demo is in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
Google releases Google Voice.
They’ve finally done something with GrandCentral, a company they bought 2 years ago.
Google PowerMeter.
Google is developing tools to monitor home energy use.
By communicating with an as-yet undeveloped set of hardware devices, the smart meter software could provide you with granular, real-time data about your energy usage.
Definitely cool technology, but not without shortcomings:
First, where’s all that data going to come from? Sure, Barack Obama’s stimulus plan calls for 40 million more smart meters to be installed, but as we noted last year, the functionality of these little devices varies widely. Some track things in real-time, others don’t.
And they’re expensive. The sensors required to track all of the major appliances in your home would be hundreds of dollars and Google isn’t just going to send you a kit with all of the smart devices.
(thx macomber)
I’ve been using a Greasemonkey script to do this for a couple years now. It’s good to see them integrate a similar method of tagging messages.
Google Sky is the newest Ajax map viewer from Google (following Google Maps, Google Moon, and Google Mars).
Rock on, Google. Us GIS peeps are lovin’ the products. My Maps makes my life easier every day.
Google is producing a map showing results from the New Hampshire primary with their “My Maps” feature. They’ve already done one for the Iowa Caucus.
Boston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit, and Providence. Soon we’ll be able to see miscreants peeing on buildings in every state in the union.
