With the headline “Bing’s Bringing Sexy Maps” the Bing Community Blog announced a range of upgrades for Bing Maps. Most of the changes are aesthetic, affecting the colors, fonts and general appearance of Microsoft’s mapping site. Some changes, however, have to do with differences between the performance of the AJAX (non-plug-in) and Silverlight versions of of Bing Maps.
Microsoft says the changes improve usability considerably. Undoubtedly that’s true in many respects, but some of this will be a matter of “taste.” Here, for example, is San Francisco rendered in the new Bing Maps vs. Mapquest vs. Google (in that order). Take a look at the dramatic color differences between the sites.
Which do you prefer?
Here’s a street-level view of the Ferry Building in San Francisco from each of the three sites:
I’m a big fan of Bing Maps. But I think the new color scheme is too “washed out.” I assume, however, that Bing tested the colors, fonts and other UI features relentlessly before rolling this out.
And now, apropos of the theme “sexy,” here’s the vintage 1980s pop tune “I’m too sexy.”
August 4th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
That’s 3 minutes of music I’m glad is not still saturating the radio. I think this stuff will become really interesting when these street level views go outside to inside. Maybe a reason for Yahoo to buy outside.in.
Our sister portfolio company Everyscape is working on building this interior scape database. I imagine the integration with Bing and others is a couple of years away but obviously the “killer” map app. Can’t just drive camera cars into stores.
August 4th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
Images are inside stores in a number of places in Europe. Everyscape (as you probably know) is supposed to “go wide” with a bunch of partners.