Brad Garlinghouse, who was previously an SVP at Yahoo, and the author of the now famous “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” is joining AOL as president of Internet and Mobile communications. What this means is that he’ll be responsibile for email, IM and other communications tools, which implicates a range of properties including Bebo.

According to the press release out this morning Garlinghouse will also be “heading up AOL’s Silicon Valley operations from its Mountain View campus and serving as the West Coast lead for AOL Ventures, the company`s venture capital arm headed globally by Jon Brod.”

AOL’s email, once dominant, is now number four after Gmail, Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo Mail (in order). Garlinghouse oversaw Yahoo mail during his six-year tenure in Sunnyvale and was reportedly instrumental in the acquisitions of Oddpost (part of Yahoo Mail) and Flickr. However, his new position in Silicon Valley and with AOL Ventures indicates that Garlinghouse, who will report directly to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, will have a more strategic role in the company.

Quoted in the NY Times, Garlinghouse says that AOL doesn’t have the kinds of problems that Yahoo did when he penned his Peanut Butter memo:

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Garlinghouse acknowledged that AOL also faced significant challenges, but suggested that it did not have the kinds of systemic problems that Yahoo was confronting in 2006.

“There is a clarity of vision and strategy,” he said.

AOL is often dismissed explicitly or implicitly by tech writers and bloggers as a company whose time has passed. However AOL remains the number four US Internet company with some category leading properties, such as MapQuest. It also is the top ad network according to comScore.

The question is how to reinvigorate the brand (depending on the property). That’s the chief problem with AOL Mail; it feels a little like driving an old car to many people: it works but it’s a little embarrassing. Indeed it’s not about functionality as much as the “@aol” address itself– and that may be a metaphor for the problem the company as a whole faces. Beyond this, there have also been lots of attempts to do new and interesting things with AOL IM over the past few years, to use it as a kind of platform but none of those have really taken hold.

As West Coast lead for AOL Ventures Garlinghouse may be tempted to grab hot new companies as a way to add sizzle and buzz to AOL. Yahoo suffered from that problem, as Garlinghouse pointed out in his “manifesto.” And AOL has made some problem acquisitions in the past. The poster child for ill-conceived acquisitions at AOL is Bebo, for which the company paid roughly $850 million. At the time AOL said “Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.” That didn’t exactly come to pass.

If there is in fact a “clarity of vision and strategy” at AOL any new acquisitions will need to clearly support that vision to be effective. There are opportunities for AOL in a range of categories but the company will need creative thinking and execution if it’s to capitalize on them. And while AOL has definitely assembled a strong team, that team has major work cut out for it.

It’s been roughly 100 days since Tim Armstrong was named CEO of AOL in anticipation of a spin-off/IPO of the company from corporate parent TimeWarner later this year. There are a slew of interviews out this morning in which Armstrong assesses his first 100 days, the state of the business and gives some indications of where AOL is headed.

Among the highlights:

• AOL sees content and its display ad network reach as its primary strengths
• It will have many brands built on more unified platforms that simplify the back end
• The new AOL will be divided into the following areas (per AdAge): content production, the display-ad network, local information and services, communications and AOL Ventures
• Armstrong gives mixed signals but suggests that when the Google search partnership deal is up next year, he’ll shop it to others (read: Microsoft/Bing).
• The ISP business won’t be separated from AOL after all
• Bebo is “in a very competitive space” (read: AOL paid too much, it’s struggling and must find a more effective strategy)

The following are excerpts from several of the interviews and articles that appeared this morning:

The Wall Street Journal:

AOL’s new strategy to compete in display ads has three parts, says Jeff Levick, a former Google executive whom Mr. Armstrong hired as AOL’s president of global advertising and strategy. The first is building a global self-service system that lets markers buy ads across thousands of Web sites. To accomplish this, AOL is building on a technology it introduced last fall, called BidPlace, that lets advertisers place bids to buy ads across a network of sites AOL represents as middleman. In May, that network reached 91% of the 193.8 million Americans online, according to Web-measurement firm comScore.

The system is similar to the one advertisers use to buy search ads, the largest category of digital advertising by spending. The idea is that to quickly increase display-ad revenue, AOL needs to make it easy for marketers across the globe to buy the ads, Mr. Levick says.

AOL says the second part of its ad strategy involves developing a stronger sales force that would concentrate on selling ads to major marketers on AOL’s premium Web properties, such as the AOL.com home page or its MapQuest site . . .

Financial Times:

AOL is one of the internet’s most prolific producers of text content through some 75 properties including Asylum, the most popular men’s site, and women’s site Lemondrop.

Executives said they planned an expansion into niche areas and would boost video production.

Combined, traffic to AOL-owned MediaGlow, which houses all its content sites, rose 5 per cent in June from a year ago to 75.4m, according to comScore, and 22 of its sites ranked in the top five in their categories.

AdAge:

Ad Age: What does AOL stand for?

Mr. Armstrong: A safe environment, very entertaining, a great content company. As a consumer, you will see this as a company that delights you. The model is Disney. We are both buying content and producing content today. The question is how does this company become great at scaling that content and providing value to advertisers?

BoomTown:

A: Over the years, for example, there were so many acquisitions. But, a lot of them became businesses that we were not fully committed to and we have to start making clear choices and letting the rest go.

B: Such as?

A: Well, we are going to be focused on scaling content, advertising, email, messaging and local, but making it easier and less complicated.

In the ad business, for example, we have 100 products. I think we can be much more successful with less.

And we have different publishing platforms all over the world, just as the Web has become about having centralized technology. We have been missing the core characteristic of the Internet, which is about one platform.

PaidContent:

Can AOL have too many brands?

I would say only if they don’t work.

By having all these different brands, are you getting past that image some people have of not wanting to have anything that says AOL on it?

No, no, no. First of all, I think we have a basic philosophy here, which is the web is going to get more fragmented over time. People are going to figure out how to serve unique audiences in faster, better, more concrete informational ways and that is a strategy that fits very well with what we have been looking at with Media Glow properties and other things. Fragmentation on the internet is good for us. We believe in it and we’re riding that trend.

It’s striking that most of the pieces on AOL out today don’t talk at all about search except in the context of the potential renewal of the Google deal, even then only a couple of them mention it in passing. AOL still is a top-5 search site. The fact that Armstrong apparently didn’t bring it up himself is also interesting. Before there was “Universal Search,” there was AOL’s Full View, an innovative approach to multi-media content presentation in search that was killed by AOL managers afraid of getting ahead of the market and doing something different.

Will there be any innovation on the consumer side of search or is that totally on autopilot now?  Has Armstrong decided that AOL can’t compete and grow share? No one asked.

It does sound like Armstrong has a good grasp on the strengths and weaknesses of the company overall, and is focused on some things that need to be immediately remedied. It’s interesting to me that he’s moved from a company where technology (not content) was the focus and there was a single brand to a company where content is a major area of focus across dozens of brands.

Armstrong and Yahoo’s Carol Bartz are both charged with renewing their companies and rebuilding confidence. And the two portals are similarly situated in many respects: both rely heavily on display ads and verticals. Both are “content companies” and both have similar coverage and assets. Bartz is under more scrutiny and has gotten far more attention. But Armstrong could surprise everyone and turn out to be the more successful of the two executives in the end.

AOL’s MapQuest has been in mobile mapping longer than any of its rivals, but it’s playing catch up when it comes to the iPhone, which remains the most important smartphone platform for the time being. This morning, MapQuest launched the iPhone version of its MapQuest4Mobile app (launches iTunes). Prior to this app the company has offered an optimized browser-based version for both the iPhone and Android. MapQuest4Mobile as an app has been available for BlackBerry for some time.

The new iPhone MapQuest4Mobile app offers a rich environment with innovative new features. There’s a great deal of personalization available and the app integrates the online and mobile experiences very nicely. The strategy here involves getting people invested in MapQuest4Mobile through personalization (MyPlaces) and customization (place widgets), as well as PC-mobile integration.

Directions, including multipoint routing, are well executed. Users can easily change the order of several stops on a multipoint trip by dragging one or more of those stops to a different position in the order. The route is recalculated accordingly.

When viewing directions in a list form, users can turn the phone (landscape) and see what MapQuest is calling “max maneuver” mode. Each step in the route occupies the full screen (second image below). This is helpful if the iPhone is on the seat next to you and you’re driving.

Users are also able to access routes and directions initiated on the desktop through the app, providing a high level of integration between the mobile and PC experiences. This isn’t “send to mobile;” it offers a deeper level of integration. Another example of this integration, registered users who have saved locations or directions via “MyPlaces” online can access all that information by signing in on the iPhone app.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new app is the icon-based “one tap” local search capability. This capability isn’t unique to MapQuest (see Google’s Places Directory, AroundMe, ManGo, etc.). However the execution and associated customization is unique. It’s also an example of how companies are leveraging the phone’s location-awareness to make mobile searching somewhat less challenging.

Located on a carousel at the base of the map are graphical icons that pertain to different categories of businesses (i.e., hotels, theaters, restaurants, cafes, gas stations, etc.). Tapping one or more of these icons shows users all those locations near them. One can then get directions to or from any location accordingly.

Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MapQuest told me that the existing roster of “place widgets,” as MapQuest calls these icons, would be expanding and will include more branded widgets as well. Users can customize the carousel by dragging icons on or off:

A disappointment for me was the absence of any rich content or reviews at the level of business profiles (you get contact details and links to external websites). However, a very nice feature of the app is the way activated place widgets populate dynamically on the map as you drag it to new areas. That eliminates the need to do subsequent searches for the same types of businesses in adjacent neighborhoods or nearby towns.

Dwyer hinted to me that a future version of the app might allow users to create customized place widgets as well. The addition of more branded icons, the capacity to create customized place widgets and the addition of reviews would make this already strong app even more compelling.

There’s already been considerable discussion of the passing of the maps traffic crown from MapQuest to Google Maps. Hitwise, comScore and Compete all show Google Maps as the traffic leader in the category. One could argue with relative confidence that the long-anticipated development is a consequence of two things: Google’s ability to refer traffic to its own property and regular innovation at Google Maps with features like Street View, among others.

According to a new post on the Hitwise blog, despite Google’s traffic advantage, MapQuest retains brand strength and has greater engagement than Google Maps:

While the share of visits is higher for Google Maps, the average visit time on MapQuest remained higher at 10 minutes and 51 seconds as compared to 7 minutes and 24 seconds on Google Maps. Google is the top referral sources for both websites, but is considerably higher for Google Maps with 61% last week while the share of visits referred to MapQuest was 25%.

Overall traffic to the maps category is down (probably because travel is off in the recession) but MapQuest’s brand remains fairly strong, with people using Google to navigate directly to the site:

The case still remains that MapQuest is a strong brand and is the leading search term driving traffic to the Maps category, but there appears to be some erosion that has taken place over time. The share of traffic from the search term ‘mapquest’ (which represents 32% of the clicks driving traffic to MapQuest)

There are probably a number of takeaways and lessons here. MapQuest obviously had no control over Google’s removal, in early 2007, of direct links to competitors’ mapping sites. But MapQuest’s complacency and general failure to keep pace with competitive product development until relatively recently certainly hurt the site.

Now the question becomes: what if anything can MapQuest do to regain it’s crown? Put another way, will Tim Armstrong focus any attention and love on the MapQuest brand? — still one of AOL’s most important properties.

MapQuest has beefed up its business locator tool. A scrolling vertical bar now appears on the upper right of every map allowing users to populate any map quickly and simply with different categories of businesses or, in the case of advertisers, with specific brand locations.

Here’s what happens when you click the logo for Holiday Inn on a New York map:

Note how Holiday Inn also has the display ad on the right side of the page (see below). That’s very deliberate and will be a feature of advertising on the business locator:

Users can also add multiple layers of business types and locations by clicking the various icons in the locator bar. I’ve added coffee houses in this case. MapQuest will be adding more advertisers by category but says it will limit the number of advertisers in a given category to avoid cluttering the locator bar and user experience.

MapQuest is doing a nice job with these features, but most of this was tested or implemented by Yahoo previously (although Yahoo no longer allows this sort of one-click display of category locations on the map). However what MapQuest calls “corridor search” is unique.

That involves locating businesses or types of businesses along a route. Here’s a hypothetical cross-country trip where I’m locating hotels:

In addition to the simplicity and appeal of the locator bar, this “corridor search” is really useful. And one could imagine how brands would love this too to help reinforce loyalty. There are lots of interesting things that could be done with advertising here (e.g., coupons).

This is yet another recent upgrade from MapQuest, which continues to roll out new features or enhancements on what seems like a monthly basis now.

As part of a wave of new features, MapQuest late last year introduced My MapQuest, a personalization tool for the PC side of the business. It subsequently renamed that offering “My Places” and has now launched it in mobile.

My Places for MapQuest4Mobile offers a rich user experience and the ability to save maps and directions. It also provides a bridge between the mobile-PC divide by offering consistency across platforms.

MapQuest4Mobile, the application, is currently available to BlackBerry devices (and free), although the company plans to roll it out rapidly to other platforms including Windows Mobile, the iPhone and Android (by Q2). Currently there’s an iPhone optimized mobile Safari experience for MapQuest.com but a dedicated iPhone app is coming.

The company also offers a subscription product with voice-guided, turn-by-turn GPS directions called MapQuest Navigator.

Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MapQuest previewed a roadmap for MapQuest mobile with me that emphasizes a uniform experience across mobile and the PC, as well as some interesting possible integrations with other AOL properties (e.g., AIM) and potentially other social media properties such as AOL’s Bebo.

Recently Google Maps passed MapQuest in monthly unique visitors for the first time. But MapQuest has been rolling out new products and services with much more regularity than in the past. In addition, on the PC side, today MapQuest Local introduced a concert tracker widget that uses default map location to show users who’s playing near them.

There’s some additional detail at LocalMobileSearch.

Forthcoming January traffic data will reportedly show that Google Maps has taken the lead from MapQuest as the top mapping site in the US. According to the numbers that I received (I’ve asked comScore to verify), MapQuest’s January monthly unique visitors were 41.5 million and Google’s were 42.2 million.

This is the first time that Google Maps has overtaken MapQuest. However my source said that time on site/engagement, as reported by comScore, is still greater for MapQuest than for Google Maps.

In some respects we have been anticipating this event for a long time, ever since Google removed links to competitors’ mapping sites from its search results in January, 2007.

Some people will argue that this is the inevitable (and potentially “unfair”) result of Google’s ability to refer traffic to its own properties. Indeed, Hitwise has reported multiple times that the bulk of Google Maps’ traffic comes from this sort of self-referring. A year ago in a post on Google’s gains against MapQuest, I quoted Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins who had written at the time:

Google sends more of its own traffic to Google Maps than to Mapquest, a change that occurred last March. This can’t really be attributed to an increase in consumers looking for Google Maps. We can measure this through Internet searches. Searches for “google maps” have increased but the term “mapquest” receives nearly 10x the search volume.

And those Maps referrals apparently increased significantly with the advent of “universal search.” But the fact that Google.com can refer traffic to Google Maps doesn’t fully explain what’s happened. There’s obvious truth in the self-referral scenario, but that would miss other significant factors.

Google has for several years been investing very heavily in Maps (and Earth), as well as distributing Google Maps across the internet via its API. The features and capabilities developed for Google Maps are more extensive and widely known than those of its competitors. And only Microsoft has matched Google’s investment in online mapping; however Redmond has not done as effective a job of promoting Live Search Maps/Virtual Earth’s capabilities to end users. Part of that goes back to Google’s search share dominance. But part of that is Microsoft’s failing.

Among the top mapping providers, Yahoo Maps was actually the early innovator in dynamic mapping more than five years ago with its SmartView offering that allowed users to find and interact with different categories of local businesses on the map. However Yahoo made a decision a few years later to opt out of the “mapping arms race” with Google and Microsoft and not match them feature for feature. As a partial consequence of that decision, use of Yahoo Maps flattened over time. MapQuest, for its part, made a similar decision, instead relying on the strength of its brand and user loyalty as a bulwark against the insurgents.

At one point I heard a former MapQuest executive privately complain that he had to justify everything he did in terms of P&L, while Google could spend freely, in his mind, and “lose money on its Maps.” That may or may not be true.

Regardless, Google steadily built out a large number of features that consumers and the market have found compelling (although not always). More importantly, Google has regarded Maps as a strategic product, arguably its most successful after core search.

Part of the continuing emphasis on Maps is undoubtedly due to its acquisition of Keyhole (in 2004), which became Google Earth. Keyhole CEO John Hanke became head of Maps & Local at Google. Hanke’s thoughtful and mature presence at Google has kept the product evolving and growing. And Maps/Earth are a PR machine for Google — witness the recent launch of Ocean and related press exposure.

Meanwhile, after a long period of near complacency at AOL/MapQuest, new MapQuest VP of Product Mark Law has brought his company’s product “out of hibernation” with a range of interesting new features (i.e., MapQuest Local) and a bigger push into mobile.

MapQuest retains enormous brand strength and may regain the lead. But the momentum is now in Google’s favor.

Google Maps and MapQuest are neck-and-neck in the fight to be the most popular US mapping site. A new report issued today from Hitwise shows the continuing ascent of Google Maps and the simultaneous decline of MapQuest traffic during 2008, with MapQuest pulling away again in the last few weeks:

In November, we wrote how MapQuest was coming “out of hibernation” with a concerted effort to hold on to its leads among mapping sites. As Heather Hopkins suggests in the Hitwise post, those new features may be responsible for MapQuest’s recent upswing in traffic.

But it may be difficult to continue holding off Google Maps, which many say has the best feature set among the major mapping sites.

I recently had the opportunity to interview two senior level executives from Mapquest to find out what the longtime provider of online mapping services is up to. Despite perceptions, MapQuest is actually a more popular mapping destination than Google or Yahoo’s map sites, and the company continues to innovate and push out new features and services, with a renewed level of energy in recent months. What follows is my Q&A with Mark Law, Vice President of Product Development and Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President & General Manager, MapQuest, Inc.

Can you share the highlights of your future road map?

Mark: During the last 6 months, Mapquest has come out of hibernation and is now firing on more cylinders and delivering more products. 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 exemplified by the deliveries in the last 4 months. Every 2 weeks for the last four months we have delivered new functionality and features. We have 46 million users that have been with us for many years. Looking at customer support emails many were happy with what they saw… despite what market pundits noted. More often users complain about changes. We needed to be conscious of not changing too much too quickly. We are attempting to migrate users in an orderly fashion to the new interface so that the people who depend on Mapquest are not abandoned. We need to be sure user base will accept changes in our new product.

Happily the things that we released, like Local.Mapquest.com (which is somewhat radical for our user base) and other the new things, are being accepted by our users… we are trending 3 million uniques a month on our new local product. Our audience is embracing these changes. For the future we are obviously doing more development in the local space and search space of “where is it, how to get there and what’s nearby” across dot-com and mobile and moving toward personalization of that experience. Currently, in “where is it and how to get there?” we are the leaders in the space. We are investing quite heavily in dot-com in the “what’s nearby” component. In the last four months we also emerged in the mobile space. We have now released the new Mapquest 4 Mobile. It is available on 4 handsets and now have released on 5 new products. It emphasizes “what’s near by”.

I noticed that your recently introduced iPhone product has a very clean and minimalist interface compared to your dot-com site.

Mark: Our iPhone product has exploded in terms of use. The iPhone has no history so it can be very clean. The interface on Mapquest.com is evolving but there is a great deal of user resistance to change on dot-com. But there are and will be lots of changes on mapquest.com. Every month we run reports against every link and create heatmaps… and we will decommission and introduce new things over time. The challenge is our loyal legacy audience so we have to migrate slowly.

Christian: We are the only mapping site monetizing our audience. For our competitors monetization is not a key element. For us, it has been since the early days of being acquired [by AOL in 2000]. In the past, this monetization was very coarse-grained and not very targeted. We are focusing our energies on bringing relevant advertising to users. They may not need as much advertising going forward with smart optimization. We run a healthy a business with advertising, licensing and subscription revenues. In mobile, for example, we offer turn by turn as a subscription service.

Mark: When you see all the ad placements and you look at the click-thrus, the users are finding those sponsored search listings valuable. Because we are profitable, we only have sponsored links that users want and use. In monetizing the site, the ads have been carefully targeted and people are actively clicking on those results and finding them valuable. Monetization has been a dirty word but monetization goes hand-in-hand with our user experience.

You have been a market leader in directions for many years. Hitwise data show a rapid rise of Google as a competitor. Many have already declared the battle as lost by Mapquest. How would you respond?

Mark: We see Google Maps in many ways as an endpoint of a search query and because of that, their growth is inherent to their business. The people that come to MapQuest are here for the explicit purpose of finding “where is it, how do I get there and what’s nearby.” Google Maps may be gaining ground in terms of unique visitors but our user engagement and value proposition is very different than Google Maps. Visitors to MapQuest are far more engaged as we are actually a destination website. Consumers actively look and search for MapQuest. In fact, MapQuest is the 8th most searched term, according to Hitwise. Google Maps is 57th. MapQuest also has a deeper level of user engagement as demonstrated by 113% more pages viewed per visitor per month than Google Maps and visitors spending 78% more minutes (13.8 compared to 7.8 minutes) on MapQuest versus Google Maps. One of MapQuest’s key values is the trust and confidence our users have in us to provide reliable accurate directions and an engaging and easy-to-use experience.

Google competes and builds technology in an amazing number of markets. Even in just the local/mobile space, they offer SMS, mobile maps, Google Earth, MapMaker, MyMaps and so on. How do you decide where to compete and put your resources?

Mark: MapQuest is in the middle of a transformation from a mapping utility to being a location-centric local user experience and destination. In fulfilling our mission of “where is it, how do I get there, and what’s nearby,” we continue to invest in our web sites, API’s and mobile products and services that extend and deepen these experiences. In recognition and in support of our consumers being on-the-go we continue to invest in deepening the connection and integration of MapQuest online with the mobile MapQuest products. Whether it’s via our wireless website, our free MapQuest4Mobile application or MapQuest Navigator (our voice-guided navigation application), we realize that mobile is a key part of future growth. In addition we offer the “send to” options of send to cell, car and GPS devices which extends the overall MapQuest experience to the device of choice for the consumer. Our goal is to deliver a more location-oriented solution that provides information before users start, along their way and at the end of your journey.

Christian: We are concerned about competing over the long haul with Google because of their ability to create new behaviors. We know that we have to evolve business to become a destination by adding more depth and value. One of the key habitualizing effects is that now that users can get maps from mobile phones and start using that, they are going to tend to go back to that same product on the web. Mapquest is trying to create loyal user habituation through a personalized profile down through the cellphone. The heart and soul of Mapquest is the experience in the routing. We can never loose sight of that core capacity. If we can maintain brand trust in the user, we feel that we have a respectable position. Mapquest maintains its pure play position. From that perspective we have strengths to capitalize on the long term. We need to cater to users in a way that creates an extension of the experience into other devices. For example, we have a relationship with OnStar that creates value via Mapquest.com sending data to OnStar.

Mark: We are not thinking that we will loose all of our users to Google tomorrow. We are not going to turn Mapquest into search.com. It is interesting how the maps space has evolved we think that our biggest competitor is Yahoo given what they have evolved into. Yahoo is much closer to Mapquest in terms of page consumption versus the shallower user visits in Google.

Where and how do you see the deeper, more granular hyper-local information developing? Hasn’t the low hanging fruit of that information (movie times, used cars etc) already been plucked?

Mark: Local is more than business listings. With the proliferation of niche local sites there is no single place that gives you the value of the experience of those sites. Thus was born Mapquest Local to enable people that once they have defined where they want to go they can see the other information they are interested in. Basically Mapquest Local is the Sunday news plus some unique internet content… and [we] let the users customize it to their own needs. Twelve months ago we couldn’t have done Mapquest Local. Now we are able to bring in third party and AOL content and enable users to take advantage of all content. Like via Yelp… why not enable users to get access to the verticals? No one vertical expresses the total experience. Mapquest has no editorial control; we link to content and allow the downstream property to present what they want to present and send the traffic down to that site. We are the 11th largest site on the internet, the largest local front door to the internet. We want to make all local content to be accessible via Mapquest via feeds. We will not limit by geography or partner but will allow everybody to come and play. We have done an open developer call for local content feeds that are topical. We will facilitate connections to feeds and expose them to our many users. There is no quid pro quo. And we provide feedback to feed providers as to how popular it is. They will ciliate content to Mapquest and send traffic back. Yelp was first to call and within 2 weeks they were live.

Please provide some background and history for Mapquest.

Mark: MapQuest was originally founded in the 1960s by R.R. Donnelley & Sons in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as a cartographic services division responsible for creating free road maps given to gas station customers. By the 1970s, MapQuest became a leading supplier of custom maps to reference, travel, textbook and directory publishers. Donnelley began making maps with computers in the mid-1980s. Much of that code was adapted for use on the internet to create the MapQuest web service in 1996. In February 1996, MapQuest launched the first consumer-focused interactive mapping site on the Web, MapQuest.com. MapQuest was acquired in 2000 by America Online, Inc. Company headquarters are in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Denver, Colorado. With an innovative business model and first-of-its-kind web site, MapQuest.com captured the attention of the internet consumer and the business market. Today, the culmination of a 40-year evolution of mapping and technology has made MapQuest a leading consumer web site and business application for getting people where they need to go.

I have seen you mentioned in several places offering actual customer service with a human face. What role do you see customer service playing in your local offerings?

Mark: At MapQuest we have always had a human customer support team for both our enterprise and consumer products. We believe that the ability of our users to connect and communicate directly with MapQuest and know that their comments, suggestions and concerns are taken seriously is a key differentiator for us in the marketplace. Our customer service also goes beyond answering submissions to our help forms. We’re out there as part of the internet community, engaging and talking to people, listening and responding. The customer service role for local specifically is focused in two parts. First we are helping to coordinate those who wish to participate in our MapQuest Local product by providing direct feedback and direction on how best to organize and provide their content to MapQuest and the MapQuest users. The second focus is to mange the feedback coming from users, much like viewers calling tip lines for news affiliates. People local to an area are the ones capable of providing the most accurate and up-to-date information. They know where they live better than we ever will and we both need to work together to make sure that the people going to where they live next to have the best information and experience possible. From our users we gather incredibly useful feedback regarding both usability and also the underlying content which we are able to pass on to the underlying providers, thereby improving their service too.

How do you rank businesses in local listings?

Mark: Business rankings on local depend on the metrics and criteria of the content providers. For City’s Best, users vote on their favorite locations in various categories. For a partner like Yelp, ratings are based on user recommendations and the number of votes.

What is your view of Mapspam?

Mark: There will always be people trying to game a system. As user generated content becomes more widely available and useful, finding ways to verify the accuracy and assign reliable reputation metrics will be an evolving process. The challenge for MapQuest is that 44 million people depend on us to be the most accurate and reliable service in the marketplace, so as we add more kinds of content, we’re looking at tools to manage the accuracy and reliability of it. Look at it this way, if username “jb12345″ told you to take a “short cut” along your route, how much faith would you have in it? What if a friend recommended it? What about MapQuest? We’re looking at responsible ways to use the wisdom of the local crowds to improve information users get on MapQuest. Using metrics like the recommendations of locals, people in online social circles, and feedback of a user’s previous recommendations are some of the ways to gauge the reliability of the data.

Speaking of user generated content, what is your position on that?

Mark: User generated content can take many forms, from feedback on the accuracy of an address to new content on a location such as ratings and reviews, photos, etc. Empowering users to help more directly to improve, supply and experience location relevant content on MapQuest is a goal for us. Users have been actively helping us with data corrections for some time, but we’d like to see it be more direct and visible. We will be expanding the role of the user in generating and providing content in the near future. Our challenge however continues to be how exactly we will ensure the quality and reliability of the information. Again a core MapQuest tenet is accuracy and reliability and since our users depend on MapQuest we have an obligation to ensure that all content is dependable.

How are you getting your basic business listings?

Mark: We source basic business listings from third party providers who make it their business to verify the data and provide frequent updates. We then augment that data with some of our own information.

Where do you see local search going over the next 6 months in terms of technology and market share? Over the next 2 years?

Mark: Local will continue to be a fast growing segment. As browsers and mobile services continue to improve, so will people wanting to know “what’s around me” on demand. Our goal is to use technology to blend a socialized, personalized, and localized experience. Experientially speaking, local has so far been rather generic, identifying users within broad spaces of geographic boundaries. I would expect to see this becoming more and more granular, focused to the “hyperlocal” level, while simultaneously re-aggregating into non-standard delineations—for example, neighborhoods instead of zip codes, which can overlap, and are defined on a social level by those who live there.

Mike Blumenthal is a student of life, political economy and local search. He writes the blog Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local Search and is a partner in a small web design company in upstate NY.

AOL is unveiling When.com this morning. It’s a local events site powered by Zvents. When.com deemphasizes the AOL brand but will become part of the “AOL Local Network,” which includes MapQuest, AOL Cityguide, AOL Travel, etc. There will also be an When.com widget soon.

When.com uses IP targeting to determine default location, but offers personalization when users register.

Zvents content is also integrated into MSN Cityguides. Yahoo has Upcoming, its user-generated events site. Google Calendar allows publishers to add events and allows users to discover/search for them. It’s not clear to me at the moment how widely that’s used, however. Users, publishers and venues can also add listings to When.com.

What’s interesting about Zvents, among other things, is that the site is trying to define “events” broadly to include local retail sales and other non-traditional event occurrences.

There’s more discussion of When.com on my personal blog Screenwerk.