I’ve seen a whole lot of spin in the blogs about how great the “new” Live Local release is. Oh BTW, would Microsoft please buy http://live.local.com as I can’t seem to type it the other way around. Anyway, Tempe is still having to use this horrible B&W imagery rather than the nice color imagery that Ask, Google and ESRI provide. Actually Ask has the most up to date imagery in the Phoenix area, but the service is so slow that I can’t use it. Maybe with Google opening up an office in Tempe, we’ll get as good looking data as they have in Mountain View.
In the end B&W imagery for the 5th largest city in the United States is an embarrassment for Microsoft and Virtual Earth/Live Local.
3 Comments
I haven’t found Live Local as useful as Google Earth or Google Maps in the past in terms of imagery for the UK. However, the recent update has added high resolution colour aerial photography for England and Wales from Getmapping (perhaps they’ll get to Scotland one day too!) and it now seems to be better than Google Maps for most areas – see post by Ed Parsons at http://www.edparsons.com/?cat=14. Think this is a hit for Microsoft.
While the color photos look nice I would rather have balck and white. For actual work not the cool factor b/w is perfered to delineate man made features. So if any one is going to spend money it would be nicer, I think to double the coverage area in high resolution b/w.
Jim.
OK, maybe that works for some issues, but B&W Terraserver imagery isn’t appropriate for Live Local. Maybe in the middle of nowhere, but not in a major metropolitan area.