Russell Beattie

This is pretty cool - the new Yahoo! Maps satellite view is here (finally!) and has some great quality images of rural areas like where I grew up. It's great to be able to finally be able to virtually wander around the back roads where I went to high school and where my parents still live. This is probably the first time I've had a really good mental image of all the different spots around that area actually. It's so incredible though that these pictures are even available, isn't it? How is this possible? I'm not on the Maps team... I have no idea how this was done. I mean, who knew you could just decide to gather pictures of every square meter of the country, and it would be out there somewhere to buy (it's not like we have our own satellites). Wild. The APIs we've got for this stuff are great too. Props to the GOOG for doing it first, but they've had their first mover advantage, time's up.

I go back and forth on the usefulness of Flash: I really, really hate it in advertising, but I love it as a platform with integrated video and the ability to do multimedia chatting, screen casts like in my last post and I actually really like our Flash map interface as well, if for only one reason: I can copy/paste a multi-line address into the Flash app and it doesn't throw out everything after the new line like HTML-form based text-entry boxes do. That's worth a switch right there. :-)

Neato...

-Russ