The bad: It seems to default to "Click to center" instead of "click to zoom, centered here". [Essentially] Nobody wants really precise centering of the Western

The bad: It seems to default to "Click to center" instead of "click to zoom, centered here". [Essentially] Nobody wants really precise centering of the Western Hemisphere -- they want to see their house. It doesn't take advantage of my 1600x1200 LCD -- it's bannered to high hell and still fixed-width formatted to fit into a 1024x768(?) screen, and even then the map would be below the fold. If you're going to put a 400x300px banner higher than the map at least kill 75% of that huge brand banner at the top. The "Larger Map" button doesn't work. Grr. The art is still cluttery -- the fonts aren't as nice as Google's and the antialiasing is still second class. From TFA: There were two things going on prior to that time period that explain our low profile. There was considerable effort working on our new back-end technology. It is based on completely new platform technologies that was consuming a fair bit our effort. There was also a bit of miscalculation in that we didn’t do much that was visible to the user. In hindsight we should have been more visible but we knew we needed to get our house in order to do what we wanted to do. -- This is a fantastic example of Mr. Spolsky's "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" -- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Google Street View and MS Live Maps Bird's Eye View have both raised the bar on mapping sites. Hopefully Mapquest has something up their sleeve here. The good: Because they're rendering a single layer (by default) it's amazingly fast -- drags out of pre-downloaded range are coming up with only the faintest flicker, if flickering at all. Of course, when I constrain Google Maps to the same sized canvas it's really fast too. I guess Satellite view + Streets uses overlays. Still pretty fast. I actually believe the VP's comments about their customer base being loyal and their ad clickthrough rates being higher than people think. Whereas Google has the Herculean challenge of figuring out how to monetize the proliferation of mashups and other users of their APIs, these guys target people more like my mom -- arguably less savvy but more likely to click on an ad. The takeaway: Because we are profitable... Excellent! It will be interesting to see how they compare going forward. I have a hard time believing the big three (G,M,Y) have profitable maps units.