November 05, 2005
Yahoo creates the first decent road trip mapping program
Yahoo has released a beta of their new super swanky mapping program, clearly a salvo fired in the direction of Google Maps. It uses Flash (instead of Ajax), and it by-and-large feels like Google Maps, except for one key exception: the ease of creating road trip itineraries.
I love road trips. I love the web. I've long hated that I can't create a decent road trip itinerary on the Web. None of the standard mapping sites (Mapquest, Google, old Yahoo) offered the ability to connect more than two points. The travel sites that offered road trip maps (Rand McNally, AAA), typically had shitty shitty interfaces, and bizarre restrictions (Rand McNally allowed for only 10 destinations on your itinerary).
Playing around with the beta Yahoo Maps, I saw that you can just keep adding destinations, and they keep stringing them together. In no time, I was able to recreate the road trip I took this past spring.
Some drawbacks:
It's not clear that you can save an itinerary. I think you might be able to through "email this," but that's a bit of a hack.
The rendering of the map information is still ugly. Anti-aliasing, people! Love it!
