Have you checked out Bing Maps Beta yet?? If not, be prepared to be impressed!
From the get go, the app loads up fast and smooth, delivering a very appealing map showing off the city of Denver (likely detected via my IP location). I’m also presented with local weather conditions, view images of the area, an option to obtain driving directions, or explore what’s nearby. Amazing features and functionality to be found includes:
- amazing experience via SilverLight
- Fast!
- Awesome imagery
- Local search and information at your finger tips
- Bird’s eye imagery
- photosynth imagery is WOW
- handy routing and directions
The map type is set via default to be automatic (changes according to my scale factor) although I also have options for road, aerial, or birds eye. Agina, the fast fading in and out via SilverLight provides a very nice effect and great user experience – panning is super fast and the POI display is impressive to say the least! I used Coor’s Field, Denver, CO as my test location.
The directions I tested from home to Coors Field were delivered fast and were accurate. If you want to really be wow’ed go check out your neighborhood using the Bird’s Eye view… wow! Finally, a very nice feature is the way that your map appears clean when you remove the mouse from the display… then, place your mouse on the map and the data and POI information as well as street center lines fade back into the display.. very cool!
See maps.bing.com
A very cool option is the Bing “My Places”… simply click on places of interest and add them to your saved places. Then you can optionally view only your places… they appear highlighted – see above.
For a truly “Google killer” experience, check out the amazing 3D photos that are viewable via the Photosynth.. incredible!
Bing Maps Beta and Twitter Maps Integration – more reasons to use Twitter and @foursquare
Expanding on my initial post regarding the latest from Bing Maps (Beta)… a cool addition to the toolset with Bing is the ability to map Twitter Tweets, this thanks to the development of the Twitter Geolocation API and the resulting geo-enabled third party apps.
first, to enable the viewing of your Twitter map, see the legend area in the Lower left of the Bing Maps page. If you mouse-over the icons you’ll notice to the far right there appears an orange arrow displaying a mouse-over tip “see map apps”. If you click that arrow you’ll be presented with a number of add-on apps the likes of restaurant finder, urban murals (I love this one), traffic, webcams, Twitter maps and many more. Select Twitter maps – if you are currently logged into Twitter you should see Twitter icons appearing in locations where you posted Geo-located Tweets… you actually may be Geo-locating your Tweets without knowing it! For me, I immediately noticed tweets that I posted using third-party, geo-enabled Twitter connected apps (Brightkite, foursquare, Flook and others). This is truly a fun service that is integrated with Bing Maps and could be another one of those “Google Killer” tools that users will love!
Notice on the map icons appear where I posted Tweets – above is a posting made via foursquare on iPhone
A full listing is providing showing all geo-tweets
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