Okay, for a map nerd like me Microsoft’s just-announced Virtual Earth is extremely exciting. Especially since it’ll do satellite / street map overlays and let us add additional data layers to the map. I haven’t been this eager to play with a new webservice since, well, Google Maps.
This is great for users – competition between the announced Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth is going to spur innovation. (Makes me wonder what Yahoo’s planning.) I’ve got a few questions I’d like to have answered, though:
- Will there be an open API?
- Can I add data from a GPS transmitter to it?
- Will it run on Firefox, or is this going to require IE?
Can any of the attendees at the conference ask? Can the developers give us a hint? Scoble, do you happen to know?
UPDATE: Finally had time to watch the Channel 9 video on Virtual Earth, which answered my questions for me. While Virtual Earth will work with Firefox, there’s no support for GPS, and I doubt there’s going to be an open API. (While there’s already a SOAP API for MapPoint and presumably there will be for Virtual Earth, you have to buy access.) Darn. I’m happy about the Firefox, but disappointed about the other two. Even though, as Paul Kedrosky pointed out, it’s going to eat up a lot of bandwidth when it goes mainstream, I’m convinced location-aware webservices (especially on mobile platforms) are one of the killer aps of the future.
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