ESRI released their downloadable application, ArcGIS Explorer 480, this week. The upgraded version still offers the same basic function of geoprocessing services, but with major improvements such as KML improvements and increase in performance.

Nokia acquired Plazes, an LBS social mapping network. Plazes provides updates of friends’ activities in a find me/follow me type of service. The social mapping application will take Nokia one step closer to “bringing people and places together” and also acknowledges the rise and demand of LBS.

Microsoft and Virtual Earth launched a program that allows state and local governments to share their imagery, called GoVE. All of the imagery from these governments, municipalities and aerial photographers gets sent to Microsoft, which in turn is published by Virtual Earth.

Yahoo Maps

Microsoft Virtual Earth

Google Maps

When it comes to cartographic design I would rank it 1) Yahoo 2) MSVE 3) Google, which should not be too surprising since Yahoo! hired a bunch of cartographers to design theirs. Since Yahoo! unveiled their new cartography, Google has introduced terrain view and MSVE has added elevation reliefs to their maps as well – although I cannot for the life of me find a reference to when the upgrade happened.

While the race for more content, and sometimes more cartography, has raged amongst the big three providers, there has been a backlash in the developer community. This was most poignantly seen in Paul Smith’s “Take Control of Your Map” article on A List Apart. As you can see in the screen shots above, the base maps from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have become pretty crowded and dense. Many Web designers would like to control the design on their maps the same way they do their Web pages leading to a movement to “roll your own maps”.

This movement has leveraged the pioneering work of OpenStreetMaps to create their own independent base maps for streets. The OSM effort led to creation of applications like Mapnik and Osmarender to style the GPS data they collected for the project, although both are some what notorious for their lack of usability. This has not stopped EveryBlock from using Mapnik to make custom maps for their data.

The map is definitely less busy than the big three providers, and I believe suits EveryBlocks purposes well, although I might have gone with a different color combination. The beauty, though, of EveryBlock’s approach is that if I wanted another color sequence, I could take Mapnik and OSM data and have at it. I believe it is just one of the many examples we’ll see democratizing cartography – allowing the public to “roll their own”.

The good news is that both Virtual Earth and Google Maps support KML, and we are seeing a greater number of applications supporting it and GeoRSS as GeoWeb standards. As the standards get picked up it will be interesting to see how they are supported and how applications differentiate themselves in doing so. Already we can see this beginning between the two titans (Microsoft and Google) expressing how their support of KML has advantages over the other. So, I thought I’d share what our experience was testing with both applications.

Google KML Support

For testing purposes I started off with a polygon data set of the 100 most polluted counties in the United States. The upload process for Google MyMaps was straight forward and my uploaded KML (or GeoRSS) file prepopulated a title and description field. Then after a bit of chugging rendered the KML file on the map. You can see the map I created embedded below:

View Larger Map

If you look closely you’ll notice that there are not 100 counties on the map (only about 44). Google MyMaps will support 200 pushpins on a map, but when you add in complex polygons the number of polygons and associated pushpins it will support goes down significantly. In the MyMaps application it gets around this problem by paginating the KML file into multiple maps each supporting the maximum number of pushpins, lines or polygons. Unfortunately you can only embed one map page at a time, so the map above only shows the first set of polygons.

An interesting observation in the Microsoft blog post about KML support noted that, “on Google Maps the polygons representing the parks didn’t load at all”. Our KML rendered the polygons fine, but we took an extra step in GeoCommons to generate our polygons as multigeometries where a pushpin with the data is included inside the polygon and highlights when you mouse over (at least in Google Earth). So, my hunch is that in order to get polygon KML to render in Google MyMaps you need to structure it as a multigeometry, or they’ve added the functionality since then. It would be great to not to have to add the pushpin to get the data, and enable clickable polygons in both Google Earth and Google Maps.

On the plus side Google MyMaps does a good job handling multi-polygons. A multi-polygon is when you have multiple polygons representing one geographic entity. For instance the United States of America consists several separate polygons, including Alaska, the Hawaiian Islands, and the contiguous states. Several of the counties in our test data set had multi-polygons and you can see those rendered in detail in the embedded map below:

View Larger Map

A second plus for Google MyMaps is balloon support for the data that shows all the attributes in a nicely parsed list. Even when I loaded up a census data set with 74 attributes it listed them all out with a scroll bar. So to recap:

Advantages = prepopulated title and description, quick load, multi-polygon support, full listing of data attributes.

Disadvantages = limited number of polygons rendered on one map, requires multigeometry KML to support clickable polygons, slow rendering of polygons, no ability to export KML or other standard.

Virtual Earth KML Support

Virtual Earth KML support is provided through the “Collections” feature. When you click “Import Collection” you are given the option to add a KML file (or GeoRSS or GPX). I uploaded the same county pollution file and Virtual Earth chugged along for a bit then gave me a message saying, “100 out 100 items uploaded”. I’ve tried this with other files and if the files has more than 200 features it will not upload all of them – just the first 200 then stop. Also if your KML file is over 2mb it will tell you it is too large. Over all this is a nice feature that lets you know the bounds of the system and what will work and what will not.

The second nice part is that all 100 counties made it on one map instead of just 44 as with Google. A second bonus was that Virtual Earth did not need the multigeometries to support the clickable polygons rendered on the map. In fact the multigeometries we included in our KML generation caused both a pushpin to be drawn and and second square that gets highlighted when you mouse over the polygon. You can check out the map here and see the screen shot below:

Sadly Virtual Earth does not support embeds, so just the screen shot and link. Another small ding, a,s you can see in the screen shot, is that Virtual Earth does not support multiple polygons. The spots where you see push pins instead of polygons is indicative of multiple polygons representing a county, like Galveston, that could not be rendered so a push pin was placed there instead. It still gets the job done, but there is still something dissatisfying about America’s or any other political unit’s borders being replaced by a push pin. The last complaint is Virtual Earth only supports a limited number of characters for attributes, so when I tested a census file with 74 attributes I only got the first twenty or so and they were not well formated. So to recap:

Advantages = ability to render more polygons, ability to render polygons faster, ability to support clickable polygons without mulitgeometries, ability to export KML (and other formats)

Disadvantages = inability to support multi-polygons, slow to load KML, limited support of data attributes, no support of balloon styling

Over all I would give a slight edge to Virtual Earth when it comes to KML support from our unique perspective. Specifically the ability to load a larger number of polygons on a map and make those easily clickable allows more of our content to be leveraged at this point. It will be interesting to see how Google, Microsoft and others continue to enhance KML support to make more data available. I believe there is still a long way to go and the vast majority of the datasets in GeoCommons are too large for either to handle at this point. As the GeoWeb and the data it interconnects becomes more sophisticated I think it will be a necessity to greatly increase the amount and complexity of data that can be handled in a browser based map. Hopefully the market pushes Microsoft, Google and others to innovate in that direction.

Before the GeoWeb came into mainstream popularity both Microsoft and Yahoo! had mapping applications. Microsoft offered their browser based Terraserver which hooked up USGS imagery for the map tiles. Microsoft launched Terraserver in June of 1998 – practically prehistoric.

Microsoft had also been active in the mapping space with products like MapPoint (both desktop application and web services). Yahoo! also was an early adopter of mapping applications in conjunction with their local search destination (although I completely failed at finding a date for when they first added maps). Despite the early adoption of web based mapping applications by Yahoo! and Microsoft it was arguably the launch of Google Maps in 2005 that jump started both the GeoWeb and the mash up craze.

Shortly after Google Maps launched, Paul Radamacher hacked the application to allow it to display Craig’s List rental listings on the Google slippy map. Shortly there after Adrien Holovaty followed suit mashing up Chicago crime statistics with Google Maps. Google quickly released an API to allow developers to do the same thing seamlessly and we were off to the races. Microsoft quickly created Virtual Earth and Yahoo! pushed out Yahoo! Maps. Microsoft created compelling innovations with birds eye imagery and Yahoo! launched several popular GeoWeb services like free geocoding and Flash based mapping APIs.

Microsoft Collections

Through all these innovations there was a constant one way flow of content creation – developers could create unique maps and users could view them. Microsoft changed this when they launched Collections May 23, 2006:

Collections. Social networking functionality allows customers to create lists of favorite landmarks and locations, attach personal photos and save them to a Scratchpad. Collections can be saved, recalled later, “permalinked,” and shared with friends and community in e-mail or through their MSN® Spaces blog.

While not well publicized the “Collections” concept fundamentally changed the work flow for creating maps. No longer did you need to be a developer or GIS pro to create a basic map and share it with other people. The Virtual Earth folks even gave users a decent amount of cartographic power and options:

Customized pushpins. A pushpin is essentially a marker indicating points of interest on a map view. A customized pushpin can easily be added with a simple right click, anywhere on a map, which will display a small red dot and a pop-up menu. A pushpin title or note of up to 200 characters can be added that will appear with the pushpin whenever a mouse hovers over it. Pushpins can easily be edited or deleted. When a pushpin is removed, whether customized or standard, the remaining pushpins will be automatically renumbered.

2-D drawings in Collections. Users can add lines and drawings in a variety of colors, shapes and styles to personalize their Collection. They also can draw lines and shade areas that they want to mark on the map, such as for marking a running or bike trail, or neighborhood boundaries).

MyMaps

Despite the potential of the innovation the new functionality did not get much coverage in the press or massive levels of adoption. The TechCrunch article on it was lumped in with other new features from Yahoo! Maps.

Just short of a year later Google launched Google MyMaps on April 4th 2007 to big headlines across the blogs, including MyMaps being the death knell of popular map mashups like Platial, Frappr and Tagzania.

Fundamentally the functionality and features of MyMaps was not remarkably different than Collections, but the buzz around it was at least ten fold. So why was the attention so skewed towards Google for fundamentally the same innovation Microsoft had launched a year earlier? A few guesses:

MapMixer

Yahoo! was not too far behind launching their own map creation application, Yahoo! Mapmixer on September 13th 2007. Mapmixer took a different angle on map creation by allowing users to put static maps on top of the Yahoo! Maps applications. For instance after the Buscan oil spill in the San Francisco Bay last year I made a lot of calls trying to get the raw data on the location of the spills, for GeoCommons, but had no luck.

I did find a PDF with a map of the oil spills so I saved it as a PNG then uploaded it to Yahoo Mapmixer and they took me through three easy steps to georeference the map on Yahoo! Maps. The user experience I thought was the best of the three and there were lots of great social features for me to give a short description of the map and for other users to comment on the map. Although much like Microsoft the application did not generate lots of buzz as with Google MyMaps, and the gallery only features 38 user submitted maps today. Interestingly, in concept, it is quite similar to Microsoft’s MapCruncher, although it is a download and supports a wider variety of raster based formats that must already be georeferenced.

Since the launch of map creation applications by the three big players there have been two noticeable waves of enhancement 1) support for external data and 2) collaboration features. Microsoft put themselves out as being the first to support loading KML, “The October 07 release of Live Maps was the first to support KML viewing and import to Collections”. November 27th 2007 Google added KML, KMZ and GeoRSS support to MyMaps. Google followed this up with social features, like commenting, rating and open collaboration invitations for MyMaps.

Performance Trials

That covers features and functionality from a historic evolution stand point, but how do they perform? We did a very informal, one user, stress test. Create push pins as quickly as possible and see when the map application maxes out or gets sluggish. For Yahoo! Mapmixer this was pretty easy. You can overlay one picture or map onto the application, so you max out at one.

In the process of loading and georeferencing the image you get speedy performance and predictable response times. For MyMaps and and Collections we had a bit more to stress. We’ll start with Collections where we created 200 push pins with good response time then got the following message “You cannot add more than 200 items to a collection. To add more items, create another collection.”

When we went with the same test on MyMaps,we did high rate push pin creation and after about 30 the system got a bit sluggish, and sometimes it would create a listing for a pushpin on left hand pane but not create the push pin on the map. The caveat here is we were doing this high speed, and when we slowed down to a more deliberate pace the system handled it fine.

MyMaps also maxes out at 200 push pins on the map, but instead of providing a warning it generates a pagination for a continuing set of push pins. So when you click on the first page you get a map with the first 200 push pins and when you click on the second page you get the next 200 push pins on a new map in the same browser and tab. Oddly it stops at 820 push pins and starts back over at the number one but you can keeping adding push pins to the map.

What’s Next?

That pretty much wraps it up for a comparison of the big three, how they evolved in a competitive environment, and a very ad hoc test of their limits.

I believe the most interesting part will be where they evolve to next. What is the next set of functionality that will distinguish one from the other? Can Microsoft or Yahoo! introduce the next killer functionality that will catch up to 7 million maps that have been created with MyMaps?

In many ways the spreadsheet analogy works well. I use about 20% of the functionality in my spreadsheet program and that 20% of functionality is accessible to me with little or no training. That 20% of functionality is what about 80% of spreadsheet users utilize on a regular basis. This in turns allows a very large population of users to create data in a spreadsheet format and share it with other people. I do not need a four year degree in statistics to use the spreadsheet, although if I did there would be a larger percentage of functionality I could tap into and create more results to share.

In the world of traditional GIS there is no 20% that is open to 80% of users. Either you are a GIS wonk or you are not a GIS wonk, and the number of GIS wonks is quite low because of the training and barriers of entry to becoming one. The end result is a complex technology that ensures an exclusive user base. Why can’t or why is there not a GIS technology that is ubiquitous as spreadsheets. Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth have surely demonstrated the public’s appetite for an “easy to use” technology. Can the leap be made which create “easy to use” web based technologies that bring the relevant 20% of GIS analytic/exploration functionality to the 80% of the market hungry for it?

The press release gives a few clues:

“For Jane’s electronic data, subscribers to its Web and desktop services can fuse and share the geospatial information in a common operating picture via ESRI’s software….For users new to the power of GIS, this easy-to-use capability will add considerable value to Jane’s products.”

So, is this a new “easy to use capability” or are they referring to ArcGIS 9.2 and ArcIMS?

Looking at the quote from Jane’s side is sounds as if the target is to make the data available to GIS professionals, “this partnership opens up a wealth of opportunity for Jane’s customers to view information in a GIS environment.” I think this brings up the compelling question of when does GIS include everyone, or when does web mapping (aka Google, Microsoft) encompass GIS. The line is definitely getting more blurry every day.