Friday, July 24. 2009

Quote of the Week

"We probably missed a generation of technology which we are working on right now."

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong on MapQuest speaking at a Fortune event, covered by C|net.

Wednesday, July 22. 2009

MapQuest Offers "a sane and modern web service" for Directions

It's called the Directions Web Service and it's supposed to be easy to use.

As I understand it, you include a simple call and can get back "a JSONP response containing the directions narrative data and then fires the defined JavaScript callback function in your app. You then have the flexibility to display the information in your UI however you want."

There's some nice features:

- you can submit the request in several formats and get it back in a different one
- queries can be quite complex
- the service can help eliminate ambiguous addresses (or not)
- response can come verbose or in performance encoded form for enhanced speed and small size
- more to come

There's no cost for the service, but you do need a free developer license key.

- MapQuest Dev Blog
- Docs

Monday, July 20. 2009

AOL CEO Tim Amstrong: Fewer Ads, More Value to Advertisers on MapQuest

Armstrong (who joined the company from Google) was asked about his plans for the second 100 days on the job:

At a baseline level, you are going to see improvements to MapQuest. Some of the pages on MapQuest had 17 ads on them. We've just removed 10 of the ads. You are going to see us bring down the total amount of ads and concentrate on the value for advertisers.

- Business Insider

Thursday, July 2. 2009

MapQuest Adds July 4 Events to its Maps

In the spirit of the upcoming July 4th Independence Day events, MapQuest has added another icon on its maps - it's a startburst firework. Clicking on it shows July 4th celebrations from When.com, which is not all that complete. The icon joins the other regular ones (some hotel chains), grocery stores, bars, pharmacies...

Adding road closures related to those would be a nice addition!

via LA Times

Friday, June 26. 2009

MapQuest "input error" fixed in a few hours

This is just not the type of story you hear about much. In Clarksburg, Maryland if you ask for directions to the High School from MapQuest or some GPSs you don't end up there, but rather at a private street. But, unlike other private citizens and journalists, instead of contacting Tele Atlas or NAVTEQ about a data error, the local TV station contacted MapQuest and AAA. The response from MapQuest:

ABC 7 contacted MapQuest and AAA. MapQuest said they had pin-pointed the problem and would have it fixed in a few hours, citing a simple data input error. Now, maybe the folks who live along the road can have some peace.

I found the high school using MapQuest's search tool here. The track and football field convince me this is a school. Using the address given in the article from ABC7 I seem to get the centroid (I think) of the town, suggesting to me that MapQuest could not geocode the address and thus defaulted to the centroid. MapQuest's address for the high school is River Hill High School 12101 Clarksville Pike, Clarksville, MD 21029 while the article cites 2250 Wims Road. I had the same results with Google.

- News Channel 8

Thursday, June 18. 2009

Best Maps of Tehran? User Generated

Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar studies the map portal's maps of the area and concludes:

"Looking at the images below [ Yahoo, Mapquest, Google, and Bing] it becomes very clear that user-generated maps win in hard to reach places."

Flickr has even swapped out Yahoo Maps in favor OSM (something they've done before).