.oO Tailwind

By Warren Hutchinson

Hot on the heels of my posting about Multimap being honored at the Webby Awards in the Service category comes some great news that a new feature-set has been implmented.

Those that have watched closely would have been expecting this due to the recent acquisition of Multimap by Microsoft.

But ah-ha, it’s not all MS integration stuff.

First up, Improved mapping functionality with Microsoft’s ‘Birds-Eye View’. While I wasn’t a great fan of Microsoft’s mapping solution, I did quite like the idea of the Birds-Eye view, a 3/4 isometric view from above.

It definitely taps into that ‘thing’ that makes looking at maps quite addictive and for me is a nice step ahead of Google Earth in terms of flying about. GE is slightly limited (unless you use the 3D buildings) at providing a decent non-distorted angled view.

Also note the Wikipedia view, overlaying information from Wikipedia that has a geospatial reference.

I find this sort of view really useful when it comes to looking at directions to a place that I have never visited. Mostly as a way on envisioning the route before I drive it. Overhead view is useful for orientation and proximity purposes, but it doesn’t really look like the real thing. Only the other day I sat down with my father to ‘fly’ him through some directions on GE.

I’d like to see Bird-Eye View fly-thoughs added to Multimap Directions at some time. I think Map24 has some sort of solution for this. Yes you can switch on Birds-Eye when in View Map mode of the Directions service. But it’s not a prime feature.

I should quickly add that Multimap’s Birds-Eye Vie isn’t available for all locations, just “major cities”. Although my town is covered and I live out in the proverbial ’sticks’.

In this new release they have also improved the directions functionality with better, more coherent step representation for journeys. When I played with it yesterday, the map view wasn’t quite working as the site was obviously rolling out across the servers. But it looks promising indeed.

And lastly, exacerbating the blur between location based services and directory services, Multimap now has Business Listings. The Multimap communications said:

Now you can use our maps to find businesses in your area - or your destination. We’ve got details of everyone from accountants to woodworkers in the UK, US, Canada, France and Italy - with other countries coming soon.

For those ardent lovers and web 1.0 stalwarts, the old site has finally gone. but don’t fret. If interactive maps really aren’t your thing or you are on dial-up or have an old system then you’ll be happy with the introduction of ‘Basic Site’ functionality. Essentially a rasterised map offering with some new features, but optimised for more basic delivery.

I like the way Multimap have retained this as important. When we at LBi first engaged with them, Sean (Founder), Eric (CTO) and Jeff (CEO) were all fairly adamant from the get-go that ALL users were important.

Anyway, there you go. Have a play and switch your favourite mapping service over to Multimap.

BTW - I do have integrity and this isn’t a shameless plug for LBi work. I firmly think that this is the better browser based mapping solution out there at the moment.

Nearly 2 years ago here at LBi, we started working with Multimap to redesign their public .com web property.

It was time for their loved, but ageing raster-map offering to be dragged inline with, then new and innovative, Google’s ’slippy’ Maps.

With a raft of new features including drag, zoom, pan, hybrid view,all stuff we take for granted now, we set about defining a sharpened mapping proposition that worked for both Multimap users and advertisers.

It was a brilliant project, great fun, hard work and really quite challenging. The guys at Multimap (which sold to Microsoft in December last year) were all smart cookies and pleasure to work with. Personally I see it as one of the triumphs of the team I work in here at LBi. Not only was it great solution, it was a great learning experience and those two things make for great projects. Certainly satisfactory ones.

Stephen Barber was, and still is, ace on this project. Will Bloor was his usual unremitting creative self, Peter Jupp smashed the design and Mike McIntyre and Gavin Edwards aced some complex interaction and James Norton provided some wonderful interface development. It was also a pleasure to see Lorenzo in action, which doesn’t happen nearly enough for some of us here at LBi.

Well, enough spouting from me. Multimap.com has just been named as an Honoree in the Service category at this years Webby awards.

This is no mean feat as only the best 15% of submissions attain the accolade and this from a pot of nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 US states and over 60 countries.

Multimap is now owned by Microsoft, so expect to start using it a lot more as it integrates into all their properties. Exciting stuff indeed.

The guys I worked with on this project were:

• Stephen Barber
• Will Bloor
• Peter Jupp
• Mike Mcintyre
• Dave Dunlop
• Lorenzo Wood
• Darren Gerry
• Gavin Edwards
• Phil WHitehouse
• James Norton
• Marcus Alexander
• Suzanne Chapman
• Claire Freund

Last year we worked with Multimap, redesigning the UK internet granddaddy and bringing it back to life with a new UX and web-two-of type over haul.

It needed it.

I have to say it was one of our finer achievements last year, good work by all.

Well, yesterday Sean Phealan (founder) and his partner Audrey sold Multimap to Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. Sean started the outfit about 10-15 years ago from home and has been at the helm ever-since, head firmly under the bonnet shepherding Multimap through highs and lows, including the .com bust of 2000. CEO, Jeff Kelisky will remain at the helm as Mutimap moves into a new era.

Multimap will remain separate from Redmond and act as a wholly owned-subsidiary of Microsoft but will pseudo-join it’s Search and Local team. It stands to reason that Multimap will benefit from some favourable data deals.

Multimap is incredibly popular here in the UK and easily provides the best quality maps. Fact. The purchase will not only increase Redmond’s foothold in the UK mapping market which is currently dominated by Google and Multimap. The acquisition will also significantly improve MS’s local advertising remit.

Multimap has over 1300 b2b clients, including Yell, Ford, Tesco and Foxstons, mostly poviding store locator type functionality. It’s also prevalent on sites such as Autotrader from which is reaps massive free usage. Multimap has never advertised and yet is a popular service when polled in the high street.

Also, the improved geospatial skills now lend themselves to some potentially exciting location based mobile services. How long have we been talking about location based services? How long have I been wanting Multimap to properly break some mobile services.

All this considered, Micromap has some exciting times ahead.

It’s rumoured that Multimap was sold for about $50 million.

Google’s mission? To organise the world’s information. Maybe it’s now trying the Universe’s as Google Earth fans can now look upwards towards the heavens with the release of Google Sky. Part of the new 4.2 update Sky allows the user to explore the heavens and constellations across more than 1 million images.

Download the latest Google Earth here.

The 4.2 download has some other cool features but I haven’t played with these yet so let’s just talk space.

Anyone want to look at some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies? Browse Orion?Images, not surprisingly, come from NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope. How awesome is that?

As a kid growing up, one of my favorite television programs was Tomorrows World on BBC 1. Imagine Maggie Philbin telling us how we can pan, drag and zoom through the heavens as we like..!

I wonder if today’s kids will get excited by this?

Apparently there are some other services around already that allow you to explore space in a similar way; Celestia, Stellarium and of course World Wind from NASA.

Accessing the ‘Sky’ mode requires pressing a button (look hard now). It’s a shame you just ouldn’t look-up, but the layers sound fairly interesting and you can even take tours of famous spacey-type locations such as the Andromeda Galaxy.

Apparently the sky that you see is appropriate to the day and time that you access it from but of course you’re location would matter too so I’m not sure how this works yet.

Quick one this morning as I’m just about to leave the house to buy my sister a birthday present (too much information).

Two things, firstly Google is planning to buy Panaramio the geo-tagging photo service that you often see in Google Earth. It’s curious to me that they’re planning to buy Panaramio rather than build geo-tagging functionality into Picasa.

Very strange.

Also, check out the Street Level features now available in major US cities on Google Maps.

You can now zoom down to street level and drag/pan/zoom your way along the street and see building fronts all the way. Zoom in and you can even read signs.

This is cool and it’s interesting to think where this might go when you consider the Panaramio purchase. These pictures in Street Level are obviously bespoke, geo-tagged shots commissioned by Google. But Panaramio opens the doors to user generated content filling the gaps.

I can’t see Google paying for the shots in my home town, so maybe UGC via Panaramio will will that gap.

The gap between online mapping services and 3D virtual globes continues to fuzz.

[Xposted: Frankandpat]

Google have added 10m resolution for Switzerland for Google Earth 4 users and it’s in 3D!!

You have to check out the Matterhorn, it’s pretty decent stuff. BTW Thanks to the Earth Sightseer for the KMZ file, I have a whole host that I want to share, but that’s for later

You have to make sure that the terrain layer is turned on to see it all and there are some great Panaramio shots from the side of the mountain too.

Added to this latest update there are some very interesting NASA environmental overlays that can be checked each day.

I’ll have more to add on the joys of Earth later, but this excited me and I wanted to share it this Sunday morning so you can lose a few hours.

Here is a posting on the Earth Community forum on all image updates.

After our second merger inside 2 years, we at LBi are currently re-desiging our own website, of which I’m part of the team between my other responsibilities.

Now obviously for a digital design agency the size of ours (some 1600 worldwide), our website should be a showcase for all those things that we often need to demonstrate - ‘Accessible sites can look good!’, ‘Ajax is really good for this type of interaction’, ‘Degrade gracefully means something like this…’ etc.

So during our process, having dealt with the ‘What we do’ and ‘How we do it ‘ sections we get to the ‘How to find us’ section and we’re considering all kinds of weird and not very useful map mash-ups like our favourite places to eat at lunch, running routes we take and all that when we put on our accessibility and inclusive design hat.

What do accessible maps look like? How do they work?

I can see how directions should look, but what about maps themselves?

Inherently visual (duh), there is a lot of ambient information contained in maps for sighted users. For instance if you look at the location of our office you will see that we are placed equidistantly between three tube stations. Seeing this enables our visitors to choose which tube line to take based on what’s convenient to them. I guess it’s the proximity of other places of interest (POIs) that is hard to communicate to the blind.

I can see how co-ordinates and map references could be spoken, but how useful is that?

I’m going to be calling my friend at AbilityNet to discuss this.

Now it’s largely obvious why blind people don’t use maps in the normal way, so I’ve been thinking about the alternatives for the blind. With regards to directions from major arrival points like train or tube stations we could provide a transcript that details how to get to our office or even an audio file that talks to you as you walk, though I suspect the blind don’t walk around London with headphones on, it’s dangerous enough when fully sighted.

I think putting in text based instructions of how to get here from major arrival points is an example of accessible design that’s useful to all. It’s only when we considered how a blind person with a screen-reader might use this information that we considered adding the text directions. Otherwise we’d have assumed that the map was enough for the sighted user to get here.

And everyone knows that website ‘How to get here’ maps are nearly always awful.

I’ll let you know what we end up doing…

You gotta love people’s dedication. I picked up on this Wikipedia / Map mash-up via Delicious and am amazed at how dedicated people are to adding content. Even the most obscure things have been added in my area.

I always thought the sort of people to discover this stuff would do it just to ‘play’ but from the amount of content added, much like Google Earth (which I haven’t played with for ages btw), it seems that people actually do love contributing to a kind of shared cause.

Now, go map the world!

Of course after my post on geotagging hacks for Flickr they’ve gone and actually added the functionality on a new ‘Maps’ tab in the Flickr Organiser. This was of course inevitable seeing as Yahoo own Flickr and a brand new shiny mapping service and it’s been somewhat successful if this article on Flickr Blog claiming 1 million geotags in 24 hours is true.

!!!!!!!!Blimey o’reilly!!!!!!!!

I remember showing someone how to link from a Flickr picture and ‘fly down’ to the location it was taken using Google Earth, they thought I was a hyper geek (which I have a tendency to be at times) and we had a long discussion about the technology adoption curve and that this stuff won’t bite the mainstream for a .

Now, don’t get me wrong, as far as I know Flickr isn’t a photo site for the masses, it’s user base are more tech savvy than your average Joe (this is all speculation and rumour filled btw - does anyone know WHO is using Flickr or where I can find out?). So 1 million geotags in 24 hours isn’t a sign that photo sharing has moved into a new era just yet, but hey, exciting stuff?
I’ve been working on a couple of projects recently covering both mapping and photo -blogging, and am even working on a geotagging offering for a.n. other photosite. More later.

But this is an exciting area for user experience professionals as I think it taps into a core human trait - collecting. And going further, it’s changing, fundamentally, how we share our memories. It used to be that we’d spend hours writing witty captions in photo albums, which while like a book these are nice to thumb through, they’re hard to share to geographically spread out family members.

Now it’s all about EXIF and metadata, GPS and tags.

I mean I can already stream my photos into a wireless picture frame in my parents house, if I were generous enough to buy them one of these wireless Flickr enabled photo frames
Bring it on.

I’ll have a good play with the Flickr Geotagging option and let you know what I think.

Yahoo! have been busy creating a free mobile application called Zonetag which will automatically append location data to pictures taken on your mobile phone. Apparently it’s possible to post mobile snaps to Flickr in two clicks.

Zonetag is only for Nokia Series 60 at the moment and seeing as I’m strutting a Sony-Ericsson w810i, I’ll need to find someone who’ll let me play, but as I understand it Zonetag adds cell tower information to the images you upload to and then you have to ‘lon’ and ‘lat’ it.

It’s an interesting one this. Bit clunky, but interesting.

If you consider what the mobile manufacturers have done to sales of the iPod, and with the recent release of Sony’s 3.2 Megapixel Cybershot phone, I’m starting to get some serious clamouring for my beltspace.

Okay, so camera phones are a long way from replacing a decent variable lens digital, but the point is that the technology is changing the way people take pictures. They’re not so precious about them, they are more disposable. They’re ’snap-happy’.

Quick to share features such as Zonetag are key for people to communicate and express themselves within their social and professional networks. Whoever makes it easy, will be winning the battle on my belt.

Found at both The Map Room and Yahoo!.