Thursday, December 8. 2005

Live Local Goes Live This Morning

Despite Microsoft's efforts to keep it a secret, Live Local was the talk of at least some parts of the Web yesterday. I noted it yesterday in this blog. By yesterday afternoon, Search Engine Watch had the press release, which my notes say wouldn't be available until 9:01 am today.

So, should you be excited? I wasn't. Yes it has the promised Pictometry Imagery. Yes it has updated directions tools (ooo – you can either print the maps, or the directions in steps, or both!). Yes, it has tools for annotating the map with you own push pins. But none of those are enough to drag me off of my preferred mapping platform.

Why? The app, now called Live Local powered by Virtual Earth, is still clunky. Things don't work intuitively. In the demo, Tom Bailey, Director of Marketing, MSN, placed a custom push pin at the front door of a building. He then located a hotel and tried to create driving directions to that pushpin. I waited eagerly for him to double click on it in the scratch pad and for that location to populate the "to" part of the directions tool. No such luck – we had to zoom to the location, then click on the pushpin on the map! That's inelegant and adds steps to what should be a simple process.

And, let's consider Live Local as a name. The old MSN Virtual Earth URL points to the new, local.live.com. Live Local is one of the terms my local TV station uses to promote its news. Live Local does not sound like maps. (I have yet to hear anyone refer to Google Maps as Google Local, though its name changed some months ago.) And, perhaps maps should not be part of these offerings' names. Local is about Search first, geography second. That said, I hope the company will also examine some of the core interface challenges as well.

Microsoft has big plans for more data and goodies for Live Local and that's good. One good one to note: Virtual Earth will in time become the core mapping technology that will power Live Local, MapPoint Web Service and the company's consumer mapping products.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Microsoft at 06:00 | Comments (2) | Trackback (1) |

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Seems like Safari users are out of luck. I get a blank page where the map should be. Firefox on a Mac is better, but I suspect it's not what the intended user experience should be.

#1 Allan Doyle (Link) on 2005-12-08 13:01 (Reply)

I'm always a little guarded over admitting that I've been working with digital street maps for over 38 years, expecting this revelation to evoke the knee-jerk "doesn't it get boring" question.

Well, the answer of course is no, it doesn't get boring, and precisely because of stuff like Live Local. Just a year ago I was paying ~$60 per year to use Keyhole Earthviewer; now it's free, plus I can scan up and down streets in A9 or check out the house where I grew up in Lexington from 3500' on Live Local.

So why isn't this exciting? I think it is. Sure, the LL pan control is atrocious. The routing interface could be improved. But remember, this is "Pong", and it will evolve into xBox before we know it.

I'm old enough to have examined the USGS Dane County pilot DOQs with that clunky DOS program from JPL. This stuff is pretty wonderful by comparison. I like seeing Microsoft, the former upstart challenger to IBM now responding to a challenge from a new upstart. I also like seeing remote-sensed imagery captured from the roofs of cars and from oblique-mounted cameras on low-flying 'planes. I've often wondered why moving a camera from a 'plane to a van made its images cease to be "remote sensing". A9/GE/LL users don't seem to make this distinction.

#2 Don Cooke on 2005-12-09 10:06 (Reply)

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