Live Local Bird’s Eye Tutorial

Good, it’s not just me: I could not get Live Local to show me the front of my house, so I welcome this mini-tutorial from the Virtual Earth blog. Bonus points for this statement: ” A lot of bloggers are talking about the new Birds Eye view in the latest release of Virtual Earth. but I get the feeling that a lot of people haven’t discovered the rotation feature yet. I guess that means we need to work on making it more apparent in the UI “

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.

MSN Developer Webcast: Virtual Earth

MSDN Webcast: Virtual Earth Tips, Tricks, and Hacks (Level 200)
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

Learn how to create several different types of map applications using MSN Virtual Earth and Microsoft Windows Live Local.

Microsoft Live Local (was Virtual Earth) to Go Live Later Today

We’ve yet to be briefed on the new version, but Media Post reports that newly named Live Local will roll out later today according to those already in the know.

The article includes this confusing statement:

Microsoft Windows Live Local, powered by Virtual Earth, will allow users to open a satellite-based map image of a city and a bird’s-eye view of specific buildings—all in a single screen. Rather than relying on satellites to capture images from the sky a la Google Earth, Microsoft’s new service is using low-flying airplanes to capture its images.

So, is the Microsoft offering satellite-based or not? Microsoft has signed on ORBIMAGE and HARRIS to provide satellite imagery, but it’s not clear that will go live today. Google Earth includes both satellite imagery (from DigitalGlobe and EarthSat) and aerial imagery from a variety of sources.

Re-Branding MSN Virtual Earth

In several pieces (including this one) I read regarding the new GoogleBase competitor to be rolled into Microsoft’s Windows Live, I found that MSN Virtual Earth is to be rebranded “Live Local.” My geeky map side liked Virtual Earth, though I hated having to write and say MSN before it. My marketing side felt it was too easily confused with Google Earth, though Live Local could be confused with the new name for Google Maps, Google Local. I’ll bet market research has told both these companies that consumers get the term “local” while maps, earth, location-based, geographic, etc. are a bit more hazy.