Map24

I’ve been meaning to write about this since I read about it yesterday on Scoble’s blog.

See, in my quest for a great map I started with Mapquest. Many of you might even use Mapquest. It was among the first sites where you could stick in an address and get a map. Or, stick in two addresses and get directions.

It was the coolest thing. And everytime someone shows up to a party, invariably they have a printout from Mapquest.

But, something was missing. The maps were small and weren’t really nice. I was looking for something, um, more glorious.

One day a coworker said “visit Mappoint.” Oh, these are nicer, larger, more colorful, easier to read maps! And life was good. My quest for a better map was satisfied.

At least until I saw Jamie’s post tonight.

He pointed me to a new map: Map24. Now, this is a Java deal. But, whew, zooming maps?

Oh, Jamie, why did you need to shake my perfect map world up?

So I tried out Map24. I was hesitant to change from Mappoint because it does what I need it to do so well – give me a general idea of where a location and is and occasionally give me directions on how to get there. I don’t need more than that most times.

I tried it out by typing in my address. Now as you know, I live in Kitchener overlooking Victoria Park. I give this preamble because when I typed in my address, Map24 indicated that there is an airport in Victoria Park. Now I know that I can miss details when looking around for something but I think I would notice an airport in my local park. I think I’ll be staying with Mappoint though the ideas behind Map24 is rather neat.

I really shouldn’t be very surprised at this though – most web services don’t provide much relevant content for Canada. Google just announced the creation of Google Local Canada. I tried searching for “coffee shops” near “Kitchener” and it gave me a list with places that are as much as an hour away. Ah ok, now I see that by default it searches for spots 75 km away but even when I narrow it down to 2 km it doesn’t find nearly as many as I would expect. Perhaps they mean “coffee shops” in the other sense. Maybe that would explain why the example search is “coffee shops” near “Vancouver”. Oh those crazy people who live in British Columbia – all they do is smoke marijuana right? That’s the impression a lot of people have I’m sure though it seems some residents like to heckle the Governor General when she comes to town.

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