Make the most of mapping down under

Mapping has been used in the past as part of specialist enterprise solutions, the last 18 months has seen a number of free online mapping services become available with Google making the biggest name for itself as the preferred destination for user features and developer offerings.

The big G is not the only one providing mapping services, especially for users in the US - Yahoo!, Microsoft and Amazon are also players. When it comes for searching for a street address they all have similar offerings, but there are one or two interesting extras available if you're looking for them.

Amazon, through its A9 search engine includes what it calls "BlockView Images" with location search results for 24 major US cities. Four consecutive photographs of either side of the street for the chosen location are displayed with a selected enlargement - great for deciding if a hotel you're booking is in a nice area or surrounded by houses of ill repute.

The French did something similar some time ago; they included a photograph of the façade of every street address listed on the Pages Jaunes site (Yellow Pages) for the nine largest cities.

Yahoo!'s offering is currently for North America, a beta version is written in Adobe Flex, with the standard street maps and satellite imagery it's interface has a more polished feel than the Google Maps offering built in AJAX. It performs more like a piece of desktop software than a web application and offers some nice extras like a traffic report overlay.

Windows Live Local is Microsoft's mapping site. Another AJAX application, it is more visually appealing than Google Maps and offers integration with both Outlook and MSN Messenger. It also has a novel feature called "Bird's eye" where detailed aerial photographs are offered for selected US cities to supplement the satellite photographs.

Of all the sites reviewed for this article Windows Live Local was fine on IE and Firefox but would not work on Safari; so much for the great promises of AJAX and cross browser compatibility.