I stumbled upon Yahoo’s maps beta while reading fark today and wanted to see what made it unique. I love google maps, so Yahoo has some impressing to do if they want to woo map geeks.
My First impression is that the interface is kind of busy but not in a work stopping kind of way. The tool uses Flash which is kind of choppy on my 3.8GHz work machine. There’s a live zoom tool and panning which is one of the greatest features of goggle maps. It makes for improved discovery to be able to pan around and see the area around your point of interest and judge scale and location.
A big improvement is the multi-stop destinations. For a sample I did a map of my westward migration since birth (right) which yahoo attached some driving instructions for. This will be a lot of fun and quite useful because no matter how much you’d like to stop by some place on your trip from A to B, most web mapping services don’t allow it.
There’s also a Live traffic tool which I remember hearing about last year at the WebVisions conference. There’s also support for yahoo’s local directory which like google’s is of only limited usefulness.
It’s still in beta, but it looks pretty good.