Google Maps has proven extremely popular and now the company is encouraging developers to run with it (a la Housingmaps). The company has formally launched an API.

One day later Yahoo! launched its own Maps API. Here are a couple of example sites using it: Sideways Tour (movie) and Bay Area Traffic Cameras.

The principle difference between the two approaches (although the companies might disagree) is that Yahoo! is hosting the maps on the Yahoo! domain and Google is allowing developers to host maps on their own sites.

Why do a maps API? It has a powerful marketing dimension (spreading the product and reinforcing its usage) and it enables the development of all sorts of applications that Google and Yahoo! might not envision themselves. It also helps these companies establish relationships with developers that may later be useful on other projects.

One uncertain area: what if I take Google's maps and start a site that layers advertising on top of them? TBD . . .

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SilconBeat points to a tit for tat comparison.

The Internet Stock Blog exposes (via the NY Post) the rumor and speculates as to why. Will another traditional media company or newspaper publish gobble up this online brand (like MarketWatch, About and Shopzilla)?

Or will it be, as mentioned in the post, AOL or Yahoo!, which is now developing a CNet competitor site (and poached former CNet editor in chief Patrick Houston for the purpose).

Here's A9 Maps' offering: San Francisco, CA. A different approach combining graphical and photo imagery (Block View).

Now if Google Earth and A9 started dating that would really be something.

Sorry, but I simply don't believe Google will reach a trillion-dollar market cap. Don't get me wrong, Google is an incredible company. One of the things that I like about them is their relative modesty, something that is not often seen by management of companies that have grown quickly. Two very good companies regretted their hubris. Naveen Jain was CEO of InfoSpace when he predicted that his company would grow like Jack's beanstalk. It has had a tremendous run, but the credit goes to its current management.

Similarly in early 2001, Forbes did a cover story on Cisco in which CEO John Chambers did not dispute that his company could grow at 15 percent a year for the forseeable future. The timing was unfortunate in that Cisco has yet to recover from the technology slump that began in earnest when the Internet bubble burst in February/March 2001.

This is an old story. Andrew Tobias wrote a marvelous book in 1970 after serving as the 22-year-old marketing vice president of National Student Marketing Corporation. "The Funny Money Game" was the true story of a company that Wall Street analysts were told would grow at 300 percent a year through acquisitions. As I recall, the book started with a (fictional) description of the National Student Marketing Corporation pavillion at a World's Fair dwarfing that of General Motors' next door. I don't have to tell you what happened to National Student Marketing.

Google is not going to go down the tubes. In fact, I believe it is helping to change the very nature of directional advertising, reaching shoppers when they are ready to buy. But articles suggesting that Google will be a trillion dollar company hurt the search business more than they help it.

Specifically, digital radio can offer listeners very high-quality sound and allow stations to split their signals to increase channels. The problem is the conversion is expensive, perhaps $100,000 per radio station, and only listeners who have digital receivers will notice the difference.

The chief executve officer of the second largest radio giant, Viacom's Infinity, was quoted in Monday's Wall Street Journal as saying, "The industry did not invest in its future. If we had invested three to five years ago, people would be thinking differently about our competitors." The key point here is the recognition that the competition isn't other advertiser-supported radio stations, but rather other delivery vehicles.

The radio industry's revenues did not climb back to the level of 2000 until last year. Earlier this year, 21 radio groups agreed to "accelerate the transition to digital radio" in about 2,000 stations so that they can begin broadcasting both digital and analog signals. That's $2 billion or about 10 percent of their 2004 revenue.

The leaders of the Yellow Pages industry should take note of the similarity of their position to radio. Yellow Pages publishers must forge industry cooperation to develop a meaningful Internet Yellow Pages local search product. In research results released today by The Kelsey Group and ConStat, 70 percent of U.S. households now use the Internet when shopping locally for products and services. This is up from 60 percent less than 18 months ago. The trend is clear.

The time for Yellow Pages publishers to cooperate and invest in its future is now while the technology is still relatively young.

Google has launched its much anticipated Google Earth (GE) makeover of Keyhole. Dubbed "a 3D interface to the planet," it's basically an upgraded version of of the Keyhole software, integrated with Google Local and personalization.

Yes it's cool, it's loaded with features . . . but will people download and use it? (Clearly everyone reading this will, but what about the broader public?)

People love Google Maps, but those are Web based. This is a client-side download. True, Keyhole was a similar application; but I'm somewhat suprised it's not being launched online (clicking on the listings results sends you to Google Local). Over time I believe GE will need to be more fully integrated with the Web product. But that raises the question of the GE product strategy.

There are three versions of GE: a free version and two upgrades that cost money and offer better resolution and more features.

MSN is doing something extremely similar with its Virtual Earth tool and I will be interested to see whether that's entirely Web-based, which I believe it will be. Even though toolbars and desktop search have made client side apps viable, we'll see . . .

GE appears to have an impressive range of features (including easy personalization and viral elements):

• 3D buildings in major cities across the United States
• 3D terrain showing mountains, valleys, and canyons around the world
• Integrated Google Local search to find local information such as hotels, restaurants, schools, parks, and transportation
• Fast, dynamic navigation
• Video playback of driving directions
• Tilt, rotate, and activate 3D terrain and buildings for a different perspective on a location
• Easy creation and sharing of annotations among users

I haven't yet been able to try them all — I'm racing off to a meeting (I'll use it to get directions). I'll write about GE more after I play around with it further.

The mapping space has become highly competitive and an alternative way into local search. Soon Google, Yahoo! (which has quietly improved the resolution of its maps), AOL's MapQuest and MSN will all be competing not only for search market share but also in the new, parallel universe of maps.

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UPDATE:

Spoke with John Hanke, GM of Google's Keyhole unit, this afternoon and got clarifiication regarding why there weren't more new GE features launched in Google Maps. He said that GE is "pushing the edge of the envelope" and is being seen as a kind of a lab to develop "what's possible."

It's self-consciously not a product intended for the masses. And Hanke said that over time more of the features of GE could be integrated into the Web product. But the advanced features can't be immediately plugged into an online app with a "zero footprint," which is how the Maps product comparies to the "heavier" client-side GE download.

Hanke gave me a description of the personalization and various advanced mapping features and I'm eager to test them out later today.
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More from Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Journal.

The full press release.

The MyWeb upgrade from the original Yahoo! MySearch was a great improvement, allowing users to save and annotate Web pages. I have been using this for months and love it.

Today Yahoo! further upgraded the offering (MyWeb 2.0) and made it possible to share that saved information and see what others have searched for and collected (under the same folders/tags/terms). Accordingly, it adds a dynamic (and potentially sticky) community layer to Web search personalization (it's a better version of Eurekster).

This is part of Yahoo!'s bigger community push — in addition to seeking to differentiate its search experience from Google — but how does this integrate (or not) with Yahoo!'s other, meta-community effort, Yahoo! 360?

Google upgraded its own personalization capability today as well. Google personalization seeks to use a searcher's history to deliver more relevant results in the future — very Amazon-like indeed. We'll see if over time it delivers on the promise of more relevant results (and of course more targeted AdWords).

Back to MyWeb 2.0. Yahoo! has replaced the folder system with tagging (a la Flickr) and made the entire application broader, clearly with provocative potential. There's a lot to talk about on this front and I want to talk to Yahoo! before speculating too much more.

Comparing Yahoo!'s product and Google's, they're two different approaches to personalization (putting aside Yahoo!'s social search capability in MyWeb 2.0). Yahoo!'s is more "transparent" and requires more effort from the user; Google's is more "passive" and thus somewhat more "opaque" to the user. A user may be generally aware that Google is tracking and adjusting search results according to his or her personal search history, but lose that awareness on day 2.

Then again, the less effort on the part of users — the more "passive" the approach — the broader the potential adoption and use.

The reaction to this may be: a) positive, b) blase (as with Amazon's "recommendations") or c) alarm. Privacy has become an issue once again for consumers and Google's size and success have made it more anonymous (ironically) and more ominous to some.

It's only Tuesday; I don't think I can keep up with the pace of these rollouts — I've got announcement fatigue.

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More from others:

Very extensive, technical discussion of Google's personalization (and Yahoo! near the very end) from Danny Sullivan in a long blog post.

More discussion of MyWeb 2.0 on the Flickr blog (pointed out by SiliconBeat)

From John Markoff at NY Times.

Big, meaty article from Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch.

Yahoo Search Blog discussion

After playing around with GE this morning I'd have to say it's really, really cool (to use the vernacular). I especially like the way the map can be manipulated and the perspective (from overhead to "3D") changed.

Once the satellite and ground images are connected (on Google or MSN or elsewhere) and you can get from the sky to the ground — from space to the storefront — it's going to be mind boggling. Of course, the question still has to be asked: what is novelty and what is utility? I think the answer to that is a moving target as the products improve.

In the context of John Hanke's statements to me yesterday that this was something of a "laboratory" for Google, I'm less confused by the launch of Earth as a client-side app. GE points the way to what we'll see on the Web in the next year or so (at least some of this).

I think that Google is still very much a technology company driven by technology development and this is an example of that. Monetization (although you can buy GE Plus and Pro) will be worked out later — probably in the application of this technology to advertising in the online product. And Google (as well as others offering dynamic mapping) will be very cautious in that regard I'm sure.

I still think the mapping battleground is online, where maps meets the mass audience. But maybe they'll have an unexpectedly high rate of downloads for the free GE. We'll see.

Here's a marriage of content and commerce that leverages the NY Times' theater expertise and following to deliver e-commerce revenues. In one sense it's a no-brainer, but in another it's a good model — where newspapers have content strength they can naturally extend into commerce.

I'm in Seattle today, and after postponement of a meeting with MSN, hiding out in the Rem Koolhaas-designed Central Public Library using free Wi-Fi and eagerly anticipating Verizon's impending launch of VCast and WiMax in the Bay Area, where I pay too much for high-speed Internet access.

The broadband drama used to be: Will it get to U.S. critical mass? Now that that question's over, the new one is: Will the private companies be able to hold on to their revenues or will municipalities turn broadband into a free public service?

The Kelsey Group met last week with Publicar, Colombia’s leading directory publisher, and was given a look at the results of recent user focus groups conducted in that country. The results were fascinating to us, because they were so similar to the results of similar focus groups conducted here in the United States.

What we discovered is the issues facing directory operators in Bogota are essentially the same ones faced in the United States, and to a large measure in Europe and other developed directory markets: How to keep the core directory relevant to a consuming public that is growing accustomed to finding information online.

Colombian consumers with Internet access interviewed in the focus groups expressed a similar tendency to use the Internet less than those without access, and are more likely to turn to search engines to find out information about local businesses.

While we must always note the limitations of focus groups, the consistency of the findings is striking to us. And the fact that these results are similar in what is perceived to be a developing market is all the more interesting.