Online Mapping: Where Do They Want To Go Today?

Date: Apr 15, 2005

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If the alternative is to stop and ask directions, the typical driver would rather run a gas tank bone dry. But if that same driver can glance at a map from the privacy of his computer before the trip, or print directions to take along, suddenly Al Bundy blooms into Indiana Jones. Born-again orienteers have discovered free mapping web sites such as MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps, and MSN Maps & Directions, which are unleashing ever-greater features in an increasingly competitive field.

Naturally, you want to take advantage of the buried treasure where "X" marks the spot on these map sites. Features—and limitations—vary based on which map site you choose, and whether you'll use it for personal or company purposes. While at work, it's important that you read the map legend—er, the fine print. For example, all three sites allow others to place links from a web page to a map and driving directions:

• In the case of MapQuest, that entity can be anybody. "From personal home pages to national retail sites, LinkFree is available for you," says the site.
• For MSN Maps & Directions, "Linking to MSN Maps & Directions maps is ideal for small-to-medium sized organizations that are not ready to invest in a full-blown location-based solution."
• Yahoo! Data and Maps, however, is for "personal use."

Companies such as MapQuest and Microsoft (publisher of MSN Maps & Directions) offer business solutions that are far more complex than adding a free link to a map or directions. After exploring the growing collection of freebies, we'll take a look at the services that companies are paying for, including the Advantage line of business solutions by MapQuest and the MapPoint line by Microsoft.

Location, Location, Location

If driving traffic to the company web site has been a plus for your firm, imagine driving traffic to the new brick-and-mortar warehouse outlet: two and a half turns past Curvy Goblin's Ridge, out past Old Toad Creek Parkway. All three of the main mapping sites offer pushbutton means to email maps to friends or send directions to the company picnic.

Yahoo gets a prize for posting this sign: "These email addresses will be used to email the map on your behalf and will not be collected or used by Yahoo! for any marketing purposes." On mailing the map, Yahoo even offers a text-only option.

MSN had to walk the plank: While the Yahoo! and MapQuest sites used a simple web field to accomplish the map mailing, MSN Maps & Directions complicated things by attempting to open my mail program, which it promptly crashed. Twice.

Some means of getting maps off the web bump up against third-party services, and break the spell of "free"-dom: MapQuest customers can choose to pay about $4 a month on their cell phone bills for delivery of maps and directions to compatible cell phones, and Yahoo! customers face possible fees from SMS and web-enabled wireless carriers if they want driving directions delivered on the road. Fees are clearly marked in the sign-up process, however.

Mapping the Course

Two sites in our roundup, MSN and Yahoo!, have free real-time traffic information. With MSN Maps & Directions, you choose a map of a very large "metro" area and then scroll down for a list of such notables as mountain pass conditions, road closures, and traffic incidents, with expected clearing times (although the word expected isn't there). Clicking a note on the list brings up the trouble spot on the map. MSN gives a good "big picture" of what's out there, so you're unlikely to be caught short if you happen to map an address that was just shy of a major incident. On the other hand, the picture focuses only on hazardous or inconvenient situations, and doesn't comment about traffic speeds on normal roads.

Yahoo! lays tiny speed-indicator colored squares along the map you called up for the trip to a motivational retreat at Tucheefeel Falls, so you see red for 0 mph, yellow for 35 mph, and green for 55+. The legend shows icons with exclamation points in triangles signifying hazards of varying severity. However, they didn't appear on the map in some places where MSN gave the addresses of hazards. To find both hazards and regular road speeds, you have to visit both sites.

Pump It Up

Like any good filling station, MSN gives out more than just maps and directions; it lets you compare fuel prices in the neighborhood. You may not see every station, but if you can plug in a ZIP code, you'll probably learn something useful about what's close by, as well as the local and national average, low, and high prices. To motor there, open a neighborhood map. On the right side of the screen, click Traffic Reports. A new screen opens. On the left, click Gas Prices. Enter a ZIP code and scroll down for price details.

Yahoo! has SmartView, which overlays symbols on a map you've already conjured up. One click down is a choice such as Gas Stations. You aren't looking at a new, strange map, with a note to scroll down for a list of gas stations and prices, as you do with MSN.

The bad news is that Yahoo! provides no prices. You have to pause your mouse over each icon to see the type of service station, and then click it to get an address, phone number, and a web site or web search—but there is no automatic price information.

On the plus side, you can leave the map at Tucheefeel Falls on screen. Start clicking down the prodigious list of Yahoo! SmartView features to get the same type of overlay icons. In other instances, there's no disappointment about missing gas prices; while I won't list all the available overlays, Yahoo's expandable categories include food and dining, recreation and entertainment, community services, shopping, travel and transportation, and financial info and ATMs. Among many useful sub-categories are food by ethnicity, WiFi hot spots, amusement parks, post offices, and tourist spots. The "insider" tourist spots weren't there, such as Seattle's Fremont Troll, but Yahoo! pointed out a plethora of other worthy Seattle spots, such as Discovery Park and Bruce Lee's gravesite.

Here's a typical SmartView example for theater listings: Hover over the SmartView icons to pop up the theater's name; then click to get the theater's address, phone number, ticket prices for all age groups, handicap accessibility, show times, and a link back to driving directions.

By contrast, MSN uses City Guides with Citysearch. It includes user ratings, but can be slow, even with a high-speed cable connection, due to some large animated graphical ads. However, some of the restaurant web pages are richer, more informative, and representative of the area. Two of the better category leads are Hobbies and Entertainment/Performing Arts Events.

By now, you're wondering how MapQuest compares on city sights. First of all, MapQuest makes maps and gives directions. Very well. It offers airports by state, although I'm not sure why it needs a huge separate button for that feature. The initial airport list doesn't turn up every little launch pad; for example, Washingtonians see Boeing Field, but not Harvey Field, until they do an expanded search. (Inexplicable: MSN Yellow Pages listed 137 airports for Washington State, including tiny Harvey Field, but didn't list small but important and well-known Boeing Field.)

Anyway, Yahoo! and MSN have free email accounts and scads of data on restaurants and shopping, but they were known content providers for a long time before they sidled into the map biz. MapQuest is about maps. And they do fine with airports, too, thank you, for whatever reason.

I almost missed MapQuest's huge section of Everything Else. Under the title Find It, MapQuest has the subtitle "Don't know the address? Find millions of places: airports, hotels, post offices, restaurants, schools, theaters, and more." When I found it, I wished I hadn't. I clicked a category and it demanded a city and state or ZIP. I complied. It had already populated the place category with the choice I'd made, so I got a list of department stores in my chosen city. When I chose another category, however, I had to supply city and state again. Dumb.

Beyond the pay packages for traffic overlays by cell phone, MapQuest offers a package called Find Me for all the "Wrong Way" Corrigans afraid of getting stranded out there. Find Me pinpoints your location via your GPS-enabled mobile phone, lets you share your location with trusted people via text messages or its secure web site, and gives maps and driving directions to nearby places. Find Me requires a compatible Nextel mobile phone and costs $3.99/month or $5.99/month with data access included.

If you don't like the idea of paying a fee every month, consider Microsoft Streets & Trips 2005 with GPS Locator. For a one-time fee of $129, you get a lot of mapping and travel-planning power, plus the GPS hardware, and there's no waiting for a download on a cell phone. If you carry a laptop, this is an option, but Streets & Trips includes Pocket Streets for your Pocket PC or Smart phone, so if you already have a GPS locator, consider Streets & Trips without GPS for $29.95 (after a $10 rebate).

Strictly Business

When a company is ready for some brutally useful custom mapping magic, it doesn't even want to snibble over the Terms of Service for the masses—oh, and someone's got a small hammer ready to drop on the piggy bank, it's possible to build some powerful business and commercial location logic into the company's web site or intranet, and potentially put the company on the map in a whole new way.

The bargain end of Microsoft's MapPoint product line, MapPoint 2004, is a $299 software box ($700 for the Fleet Edition) for business mapping and data visualization. MapPoint 2004 calculates optimized routes; provides detailed driving directions; analyzes trends; evaluates performance by geography; offers demographic information; supports data from Access, Excel, and other common databases; adds maps to reports and presentations; and saves maps as linked web pages or to a Pocket PC.

What some companies don't guess is that the $299 package also lets developers extend their applications with the MapPoint ActiveX Control, and extend the MapPoint application itself with the COM application programming interfaces. The software also supports GPS.

On the high end, the Microsoft MapPoint Web Service (MWS) annual platform access fee starts at $8,000, which includes 500,000 transactions. One thing this serious money buys is an XML-based web service, which should make integrating location-based services, such as proximity searches, a clean and standard procedure. MWS can help put a store locator on a company's web site—showing the closest retail location for the customer with a map and driving directions, key points of interest along the way, ATM machines, gas stations, etc. A company can build an application that allows potential customers to search by location attributes—for example, a store that stays open late—and then give driving directions.

MWS includes a module called Mobile Location Service (MLS) which acts as a proxy between the application and the web service, working off the mobile operators' networks on the phone, where no GPS is required. Using MLS, companies can track employees rather than vehicles, cutting costs. A case study of a social service agency reports plans to connect social workers to MLS with location-aware mobile phones, so it can immediately identify who is closest to a child in an emergency. In the fleet industry, GPS may be used, and data stored about trouble spots along routes, which may aid in route improvements.

MapPoint 2004 and MapPoint Web Services are oddly complementary, and there are some surprising holes if you read the two lists of features and try to imagine eating just one. The good news is how much you could get with just MapPoint 2004. Check out Microsoft's feature comparison.

MapQuest's customizable business solutions, the Advantage line, begins at $5,000 plus transaction fees for the starter "standard mapping solution." Somewhere along the line, it's possible to build in mapping, optimized routing, proximity searches, a store locator, driving directions, asset tracking, and searches—customers can even plot multiple store locations on a single map with custom icons.

MapQuest has three main components:

• Site Advantage is an XML-based web service that lets customers integrate maps, driving directions, and proximity searches into their sites.
• Advantage API is a development environment that lets you choose the programming language, while MapQuest hosts the mapping and routing engines and geographic/location data.
• Advantage Enterprise brings the geographic server, bundled data, and complete set of MapQuest APIs behind your corporate firewall for complete control and security in your own environment.

You can fan out to more information on the different Advantage products from the overview page.

Wrapping Up Mapping

There's a lot to choose from in our little mapping survey. Many more products are available, but these are the strongest. In the time it takes you to fold up your map and hit the road, you can look over the following little chart to remind you of what's online at the three free sites we visited. Happy trails!

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