Slashgeo

Amazon Web Mapping Service

posted by Satri on Thursday November 03, @08:22AM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the soon-McDonald-web-mapping dept.

After Google Local and MS Virtual Earth, scrappad tells us Amazon added a map service to A9. From the article: "This is really awersome, and to be honest its even better than Google Maps and Virtual Earth. Firstly it doesnt make use of tiles, and full images, very similar to the ESRI maps and probaby one of the other biggest things is that, it provides imagery, like real photographs of the streets etc."

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• A9 Georeferenced Photos: A Good Start

  (Score:2, Interesting)

  by shepshep (136) on Thursday November 03, @11:20AM (#173)

  I saw this a month or two ago and was amazed with the georeferenced photos. The idea is simple, but that they actually went out and took (or paid someone to take) the photos, and that it works fairly nicely, is impressive. There is room for improvement—especially annoying is the large number of streets for which A9 has photos of one side of the street but not the other for no apparent reason—but overall, A9 makes a great original contribution.
  
  How long until Google Earth and the forthcoming ArcGIS Explorer announce similar functionality?
• Not really all that cool

  (Score:1, Interesting)

  by Anonymous Voxel on Thursday November 03, @12:07PM (#174)

  I dunno, I think it's kinda dumb. Georeferencing a photo is a easy, having it add value to my spatial comprehension is hard. This setup does nothing for me.
• street-level imagery is not new

  (Score:2, Insightful)

  by danharan (101) <{chebuctonian} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday November 03, @02:13PM (#175)

  The French yellow pages (pagesjaunes.fr) had pretty photos back in what, 2000? The A9 UI is better, but this still doesn't feel like it was user-tested. I can't tell if that's the left or right side of the street either. There has got to be a simple way to do that.
  
  It amazes me that large internet based corporations can spend gazillions on imagery and still not do basic usability work. sigh.
• Which side is which?

  (Score:3, Insightful)

  by geognerd (63) on Friday November 04, @05:33PM (#178)

  It's kinda cool. Not that useful in my opinion. My problem is knowing which side of the street I'm looking at. There's the little diagram in the lower-right of the screen showing photos in a filmstrip above and below the name of the street. How do I know which images are on the left or right side of the street? Put a frigging compass on the filmstrip, guys! It also seems inconsistent. In one case, the east frontage of the street was shown on the top of the film strip. In another case, the east frontage was shown on the bottom. I used Chicago's Michigan Ave as a test. This thing would be no help to out-of-towners.