Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

By now you’ve probably all seen MSN’s Virtual Earth. It’s nice, there are lots of things I like about it and a few things I dislike.

• I like the scratch pad. I think it has lots of uses like marking multiple positions in the city.
• Map position, zoom, searches, and the scratch pad are (optionally) persistent.
• As you drag the map around, searches update and find new locations in your view. If you’re looking for somewhere (as is the case with a search), this makes a lot of sense. This works well only because you can save locations to the scratch pad. Otherwise it would be frustrating having a location I wanted to remember disappear as I dragged it out of view.
• Up to three searches at once. It’s a little annoying that information pops up on mouse over, but I’ll live.
• It tries too hard to be a desktop application. All the floating layers look like small windows, but they don’t quite act like windows (e.g., you can’t drag or resize them.) But they shouldn’t act like application windows in the first place because it’s a web page and it breaks user expectations. To further add to the confusion, the Community link does actually open in a new window.
• The domain name is too long. I find that typing out virtualearth.msn.com is much harder than maps.google.com. Why isn’t it just earth.msn.com?
• Small UI things like the first search color (purple) and the scratch pad color (blue) being similar (the use of different shapes is a nice accessiblity touch). I also don’t like the word Permalink because it only has meaning to people who read blogs (which doesn’t include most people).

Overall, I’m glad MSN’s Virtual Earth exists because competition is a good motivator for improving both mapping sites.