geobloggers

The new tiles set has been working for us in our dev environment for a while now so I’m used to seeing them. But of course totally forget that they were going public today. I don’t think anywhere that didn’t have mapping data before has it now, i.e. Tokyo is still incredibly sparse, just that the maps have been improved somewhat. Zoomed out views look great, here’s the US …

I’m not trying to be US centric here, but screen grabbing the whole world just makes everything too tiny to see in a scaled down image.

In response to feedback the maps now have far higher contrast, making it easier for people with limited visibility. Personally I’m all for a totally black and white tile set, but I think I’ll have to wait a little longer for that. The new set though is much better than the yellow roads on a sandy back. Printing was also a problem with the old set, not so much now … not that I’m sure you’re supposed to print them out?!

Finally it all gets a little colourful zoomed into a city. Not shown here, as I didn’t want too many screenshots is that in a couple more levels individual buildings and types of buildings are highlighted and named.

Of course now we have the extra fun of neighborhoods being defined on the map, which may or may not match where our geocoder thinks things are. So you can have a photo placed on the map in one place, recorded as being in another place, while “the people” may think an areas is actually somewhere else altogether.

Duboce Triangle, shown in blue slightly off left at the bottom of the map has enough debate from even the people who live in it as to where the boundaries are …

… we already have a few reports via the help system about what parts of the world should or shouldn’t belong to China or Wherever, which makes it good to see that this kind of political debate has now been brought down to a local level.

Overall though, another great update from the map tiles team. It’s sometimes easy to forget just how little information was on the original Google and Yahoo (oh and Microsoft) maps when they first launched. Getting all the cities in the world mapped is just a matter of time, how they get mapped is where the interesting stuff lies.

[Edit: Duh as I typed all the above the Yahoo! Local & Map Blog posted their update: Yahoo! Maps Global Rollout Gets a New Look – and a New Platform!]

[Edit 2: See also:]
The Map Room: Yahoo Moves to New Map Platform (”Possibly better”)
IDG News Service: Yahoo remakes mapping site
All Points Blog: Yahoo! Drops DeCarta for Mapping Engine; New One Live Today
reDesign: Yahoo’s new, improved maps