SSIS Junkie : live maps

Virtual Earth, calling Side Street. Come in SideStreet. Over...

jamie.thomson — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:36:00 GMT

Perhaps it really is over!!

There was an interesting internal email thread within Conchango today which began with an email from Simon Knightley saying this:

I recently came across Microsoft’s response to Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth at http://maps.live.com/
If you select the 3D option and install the active X control, you get all the functionality of Google Earth without leaving your browser, with an easy to navigate interface.
Microsoft may not be product innovators, but they certainly know how to roll up their corporate sleeves and respond to the market.

Whilst I'm sure this is nice to hear for those at Virtual Earth it begs the question why it has taken such a long time for Simon (who happens to be a very smart, clued-up guy, by the way) to become aware of it. After all, it was released at least 9 months ago. Yet again Microsoft seem to be doing a very poor job of telling people about their Windows Live offerings although I heard on the QT today from someone internal at Microsoft that now they are into fiscal 2008 the marketing heat is going to be turned up.

In response to Simon's email I forwarded a link to a collection I built recently that included this 3D view of Las Vegas that caused Rob Grigg to comment "This looks like flight sim online". The more interesting reply though came from Ciaran Hanway who had this to say:

Google Earth has Google Street view, which I think is infintely better for the voyeuristic among us:
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/
The Geek in the video explains it all very well. You can zoom down to specially-photographed streets and have a rotating view of the street level. Only a few major cities have been photographed, but apparently, there are a lot of Google vans being spotted doing the rounds and taking photos.

Ciaran raises a great point. The viral mouth-to-mouth that accompanied Google StreetView's release has helped to make it far more well-known and far more well-received than Virtual Earth 3D. That then got me thinking; what has happened to Microsoft's like-for-like offering Sidestreet which they first brought to an unsuspecting public (wait for it) EIGHTEEN MONTHS ago. I suspect they are still planning to bring this but since Google beat them to the punch and released StreetView the game has changed a little and Microsoft need to do something even better or they might as well not bother. Hence, I suspect that when Sidestreet does finally get released it will look a lot different than it did 18 months ago and will probably include some aspects of one or more of the fantastic photo technologies Photosynth, Seadragon and HDView.

-Jamie

P.S. If driving around city streets takes your fancy then check out http://www.livederby2007.com/. Perfect Friday lunchtime filler if you happen to be somewhere other than in the pub. If you liked Pacman back in the 80s then you'll love this.

Mobile search clients reviewed

jamie.thomson — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:12:00 GMT

One month ago I published a review of Google Maps for Mobile and Windows Live Search for Mobile which you can read here. Today Gear Digest have published their own, much more detailed, comparison of the two as well as Yahoo's similar offering. Unlike myself who just did a feature-by-feature comparison Gear Digest make a firm recommendation (if you can be bothered to read that far - its 8 pages in). If you think about whose blog you are reading right now and the fact that I'm pointing it out then you can probably guess what they recommended.

Read Gear Digest's review here.

Thanks for the tip.

-Jamie

Windows Live: v2 of Windows Live Search for Mobile hits the shelves

jamie.thomson — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:40:00 GMT

Version 2 of Windows Live Search for Mobile (WLS) has been released. Read the announcement here which contains screenshots and in this case a picture really does tell a thousand words.

Here's the list of new features:

Get movie times
Search for restaurants and see ratings
WLS will now cache onto your storage card if you have one installed (thank god, the biggest problem in v1 was it taking up all my storage space)
Auto re-route of directions if you get lost (only works if you have GPS along for the ride)

Some other announcements:

A beta of WLS is now available for Blackberry phones.
Microsoft are also touting their mobile search portal at http://m.live.com. Search the web, images, news, local listings and instant answers (including from Encarta) right from your mobile phone. Its actually worth checking it out on a normal browser (i.e. not on a mobile device) as well, you might prefer it to your regular search engine.

If you want to know more about WLS then read my comparison of it with Google Maps for Mobile here. With this release Microsoft have nudged themselves ahead in the mobile search space, what can Google counter with (one would hope it will be something pretty good)?

Its also now plainly obvious why "Windows Live Search for Mobile" is so-called rather than "Windows Live Maps for Mobile".

-Jamie

UPDATE: See a video of this in action here.

Mobile Maps

jamie.thomson — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 05:15:00 GMT

Google have created quite a stir with their Google Maps for Mobile tool (my colleague Keni Barwick has talked about it here) but did you know that Microsoft have had a very similar tool called Windows Live Search for Mobile available for alot longer? These two products are the best examples that I can think of to illustrate the software-and-a-service paradigm that is emerging. The software is the thing you install on your phone, the service is the search engines that sit in the cloud.

I assumed that Keni would have used the Windows Live product rather than the Google one because he's generally a Microsoftophile so I asked him why he didn't. Here's the email conversation we had (copied word for word):

Me: Why didn't you use the Windows Live version?
Keni: It’s ****
Me: Why? Give me more [reasons] than that.
Keni: I can't mate as I've not tried it to be honest

This kinda goes back to the branding debate that I talked about recently. People just assume that the Google one will be better because its Google. As usual though the reason that nobody knows about the Windows Live offering is that Microsoft do such a poor job of telling people.

I've been using both of them for quite a while and in this blog entry I'm going to do a comparison piece on the two. And it will be completely unbiased. I promise.

For conciseness I'll refer to Google Maps for Mobile as GMM and Windows Live Search for Mobile as WLS.

Overview

Essentially the two are pretty much the same, its the odd nuance here and there that differentiate them. They both provide the same basic functionality:

Search for locations, businesses, services and places of interest and display them on a map
Integrate with your phone's built-in or connected GPS receiver (if it has one). I don't have a GPS receiver unfortunately so haven't been able to test this out.
Live traffic information is available provided you live in a big US city. I don't so I haven't tested this either.
Driving directions

The killer feature for me has been the driving directions. I've been living in a new part of the world for the past 10 months and these tools have been invaluable to me in finding my way about. Its been like having an AtoZ of the entire planet in my pocket. That's no overstatement. As I say though there ARE some differences so, here comes my blow-by-blow account of GMM and WLS.

The Maps

The maps on GMM are the same as what you will see on http://maps.google.com/. Similarly the maps on WLS are the same as what you will see on http://maps.live.com/ so your choice of whether to use GMM or WLS may well depend on which of the full online versions you use.

I did a search on both products for "Edinburgh Castle" and here are what they both display:

and here are the aerial/satellite shots

As you can see they're very similar. The key difference is that WLS overlays roadnames onto the aerial shots, GMM doesn't. In the case of this search on Edinburgh Castle GMM has more detail on the map than WLS.

Pressing 1 on the screenshots from GMM above will display basic contact information although in this case it didn't provide the phone number anywhere which WLS manages to display on the map.

Searching

By comparing the search abilities we are kind of taking this outside the realm of just comparing GMM and WLS but we can't really compare the software part of software-and-a-service without considering its interaction with that service.

The comparison here is basically the same as that with their big brothers, Google Maps and Live Maps. GMM has a single searchbox whereas WLS has two, one for the business or service that you are searching for and another for the location.

I won't comment on which is the better approach, plenty of people have done that before me and you can make your mind up for yourself..

I did some more test searches to see which returned the better results. First test, search for my employer, "Conchango, London".

WLS managed to find our head office whereas GMM didn't return anything. Note I tried just using "conchango" as the search term and got the same result.

Next I tried searching for my hometown rugby team:

As you can see, both came up with nought so I tried the footy team instead.

GMM couldn't find anything whereas WLS actually returned 5 different links, none of them pertaining to the actual real location. I'd rather not have any results at all rather than inaccurate ones so all things considered searching is pretty much a tie.

Extra Features

Both GMM and WLS have features that the other has not.

I particularly like GMM's Contacts integration whch adds a menu item 'Locate in Google maps...' to any contact containing an address as can be seen here:

and indeed in this case it managed to successfully locate the address on a map as seen here:

WLS has got a very nice feature that categorises businesses and services thus allowing you to search for a list of those services that are local for you. For example, here's a series of screenshots that show how I can get a list of restaurants local to my (temporary) home in Bakersfield, California.

> > >

Of course, you can map all of those results as well:

(As you can see, Bakersfield isn't blessed with a plethora of great restaurants!)

As you can see both tools are very similar whilst both have some extra features that give them a unique selling point. I can't make my mind up which is better and I tend to flip between the two of them which admittedly is pretty stupid given the meagre rations of disk space and processing power available on my phone.

I hope this has proved useful. If you have any questions or comments about features on the two of them then don't hesitate to reply here with a comment.

-Jamie

Windows Live: Gripes

jamie.thomson — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:54:00 GMT

As regular readers will know I keep a keen eye on what is happening in our industry as to regards web "stuff"and in particular I pay close attention to Microsoft's Windows Live initiative. There are a lot of things I like about what they are doing though at the same time there are quite a few that I don't. Here is a selection of the issues currently pissing me off:

Microsoft have provided http://feedback.live.com/ as a mechanism for providing them with bug reports and ideas/suggestions. My problem with it is that the feedback is one-way only. You compose your message, correctly categorise it, check it for clarity spelling and grammer and all that good stuff; hit the 'Submit' button and it disappears off into the ether never to be heard from again. You don't know if Microsoft have any opinion on your idea - you don't even know if someone has read it. I have taken to trawling the internet for email addresses for people working on the product teams rather than use this formal feedback mchanism. Quite frankly, I hate feedback.live.com, and whoever in Microsoft conceived of this feedback process should be demoted, fired or perhaps even shot. They should take a leaf out of the book of http://connect.microsoft.com/ and force their staff to reply. Make them both visible and accountable.

I have been discussing with John Welch a problem with my SSIS Search Macro - some of his blog entries posts couldn't be found even though I have his site listed on the macro. Upon digging a bit further we found that the entries in question could be found if we searched http://agilebi.com/cs/blogs/ but not if we searched http://agilebi.com/cs/blogs/jwelch even though the entries were below that directory. Just to prove it go here to see the search that works and here to see the one that (at the time of writing) does not. Smells like a bug to me.

2 days ago I submitted 2 Live.com collections to the Live Gallery. A day later I got 2 automated emails for each of them (4 in total, 1 would have been enough) telling me that the collections didn't have any content in them (which was not true). Smelling like another bug methinks - or at least a lack of education as to what a user is supposed to do!

Live Maps is a fantastic service and I have said so before. Its feature rich and, in my opinion, is the best online mapping tool out there. Unfortunately all that great functionality comes at a price - it isn't the easiest of mapping tools to use. Scoble was on this very same tip recently. They need to sort out their user experience to back up what is fantastic functionality.

The latest naming fiasco was revealed at the weekend. Formerly their web based mail client was called Windows Live Mail and the desktop client Windows Live Mail Desktop. Now the desktop client has got the Windows Live Mail moniker and the web-based client is Windows Live Hotmail. Why did they bother stop calling it hotmail in the first place? This is on top of the Virtual Earth-->Microsoft Maps-->Live Local-->Live Maps-->Windows Live Maps naming fiasco plus whatever name changes Live Maps went through in the interim that have escaped me.

http://images.live.com/ is a very impressive search tool that enables you to find images related to your search term. For example, here is a collection of images pertaining to my old high school. What surprises me though is that it is not possible to get an RSS feed either of those images or one of my own personalised collections of images.

Similarly it is not possible (as far as I know) to get an RSS feed of photos on your Live Space. Photos on Live Spaces lags behind Flickr in many many ways - this is just one of them.

How about you? Anyone else using Windows Live Services got anything to moan about?

-Jamie

Posted to Windows Live (RSS feed)

Brand value on the internet

jamie.thomson — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:05:00 GMT

Blog king Robert Scoble recently posted a mildly critical opinion of Live Maps in comparison to Google Maps. That isn't what got my attention though and isn't why I'm posting this. The discussion in the comments section got round to brand value on the internet and Robert stated:

"Brand doesn’t mean *** anymore. It’s who has the best service. Period."

I don't want that to be taken out of context so I must point out that Robert was specifically talking about the value of Microsoft's Windows brand as services and software moves to the internet.

To be fair, he later retracted it:

"my point about branding was stupid and I retract it. Of course brand means a lot."

It got me thinking though. How valuable is a brand on the internet? In recent history Windows has probably been the most well-known brand in our industry and yet Microsoft is losing big-time in the online game. To add fuel to the debate, here is a short synopsis of a conversation I recently had with my fiancé, Helen.

Helen: I know you use all Microsoft's Live stuff all the time but I'll stick with Google thanks.
Me: Why?
Helen: Cos I'm using what I know and its a trusted source. I'm not saying all the stuff from Google's competitors isn't good but I just don't feel the need to go and find out.

Helen isn't a techie-geek like me and I think that puts her in the majority of internet users, hence her opinion here is very valuable. She used the word "trust" in reference to Google and I take that to mean that she trusts the Google brand. That trust is built out of her experiences of Google search and that tallies with the second bit of Robert's comment "It’s who has the best service".

[By the way, Helen isn't completely correct when she says I use Live all the time. For searching I definately prefer to use Google, and I'm a very big user of Flickr. I also use Live Maps, Twitter (now and again) Live Search macros, Helen and I's Live Space, Live Writer... amongst others]

So, how valuable IS a brand on the internet? Well if brand were the be all and end all then Youtube wouldn't have come from nothing to become the astounding success story that it currently is. Neither would Flickr or MySpace. Or, to a lesser extent, Twitter. They are all big brands now of course, but they all came from nothing.

There are people that blog on this site that know far more about the value of a brand than I do so hopefully they'll have an opinion around all this. In the meantime, what do you think? What is going to determine who becomes the internet powerhouse(s) in the future? Let me know by leaving a comment.

-Jamie

UPDATE 2007-04-23: I saw this report: http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39166829,00.htm this morning stating that Google has been named as the most powerful brand of 2007. Good timing!!

Windows Live: Missing feature in Live Search Mobile

jamie.thomson — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 08:31:00 GMT

I recently downloaded Live Search Mobile onto my smartphone. One of the best features about it is that they have categorised local amenities so that if you want to to find (say) your nearest restaurant it really is very easy to do. The high-level categories are:

Activities
Government and Community
Health and Fitness
Hotels and Accomodation
Nightlife
Restaurants
Shopping and Services
Transportation

Recently however I uncovered what I reckon is a glaring omission from their categories. The 'Health and Fitness' section contains a subsection of 'Hospitals'. That's all well and good but it doesn't differentiate between hospitals that do and do not have an emergency room. I would have thought that that would be a prime feature for a mobile location based service such as this. What do you think?

I would pass this feedback onto the Windows Live team via http://feedback.live.com/ but unfortunately I grew exasperated with that site a long time ago given the fact that the feedback is wholly one way - you never hear back from them.

-Jamie

Live Maps demo video

jamie.thomson — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 04:52:00 GMT

I have spoken before about just how cool I think the Live Maps experience is and I also said that the Live taem needed to start spreading the word about it better than they are doing at the moment. Well, perhaps they took me at my word because today the Canadian Live team have released this 6 minute video that shows off some of the features including the best one of all, 3D maps.

If you've got any interest in mapping technology at all then this is well worth a look.

Oh, and thanks to Steve Clayton for the tip.

-Jamie

Windows Live: New release from the Virtual Earth team

jamie.thomson — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 01:17:00 GMT

As reported here on the Virtual Earth blog there was a new release of Virtual Earth recently. Normally interim releases wouldn't be very interesting but there's some new functionality that I requested a while back and I'm thrilled that its now in there.

Namely, you can now measure the distance of routes. This is really useful if, for example, you go for a daily run or bike ride and want to know how far you've been. Observe:

[Click through on the map to get the full Virtual Earth navigation experience]

Equally as cool, as you're drawing the route you get a tooltip showing distance so far:

I think that's really useful and, therefore, really cool. Virtual Earth continues to leave Google Maps standing yet still everyone is still using Google. Perhaps Microsoft need to start shouting louder about it?

-Jamie