MQ Vibe is launching with 50,000 neighborhoods to start.

The idea is certainly compelling: to rank various neighborhoods and local businesses as a way to help residents and tourists (and maybe house/apartment hunters) quickly understand what’s good and what’s interesting about places. Conceptually I like what MapQuest is doing although the first “iteration” isn’t necessarily going to win a lot of converts from Google Maps.

Ever since Google dethroned MapQuest as the top mapping site more than a year ago AOL has been searching for ways to renew its venerable property — which still has a stronger mapping brand than Google Maps — and regain lost momentum. Among other things MapQuest embraced an “open” strategy, launched a Local Business Listings Center and introduced transit and walking directions.

MQ Vibe is generally intuitive and offers an easy to use UI that allows people to zoom in or zoom out on a grid of neighborhoods. It’s designed for browsing rather than searching, though search will become available. The general idea is to more efficiently get to “best of” and “best places” but also to facilitate a kind of serendipitous discovery that largely doesn’t happen on Google Maps.

I like the visual nature of the site, including the images associated with each of the neighborhoods. But there are things that MapQuest can do to tighten and clean up the UI. It feels very much like a work in progress. For example, the map and related listings are entirely obscured below the fold if you’re viewing the site on a laptop. In addition AOL has reserved a perhaps too-generous skyscraper area on the right for advertising. But these are all things that can be tweaked and refined.

The concept is valid and I’m hopeful that MapQuest can create a really useful site that delivers on the promise of “local discovery,” a project that has generally shifted to mobile apps (e.g., Foursquare, Bizzy, Alfred, Where, etc.).

Numerous online sites in the past tried, and almost without exception failed, to make good on the “hyper-local” effort that MapQuest is pursuing. For example, EveryBlock was an attempt to compile data and information at the neighborhood level but there was no business model until the site sold to MSNBC. Since then it has become a community and local discovery tool similar to what MapQuest is attempting with MQ Vibe. (There are numerous other examples of good hyper-local concepts that have essentially failed in execution.)

MQ Vibe users can mouse over neighborhoods or individual business pushpins to get more information about a place, including its ranking. The site also solicits feedback from users and will incorporate that as part of its ranking algorithm. Of course Facebook is used here, right now to generate exposure for MQ Vibe (and because it’s becoming the de facto “identity management” platform online). However over time MQ Vibe can and will do more with social data.

In the major advantages column, MapQuest doesn’t have to worry as much about how to generate traffic for MQ Vibe or about developing a business model. The company will use MapQuest.com to drive traffic to MQ Vibe. MapQuest also expects neighborhood-related queries on Google to generate direct traffic as well. MapQuest will also leverage Patch as a content source and potentially integrate MQ Vibe into Patch sites in the future. There are many interesting possibilities.

Over time AOL intends to potentially evolve MapQuest.com into a more dynamic site that may look more like MQVibe. But that’s still to be determined.

As you might expect there will also be mobile app versions of MQ Vibe. And the apps may prove more immediately useful and be adopted more rapidly than the site itself.

With MQ Vibe, MapQuest is on to something very interesting with a great deal of potential. However to make it work the company will need to keep developing and refining the site. It will need to be experimental, creative and keep investing until it builds something that is at once really useful and utilitarian (as MapQuest is today) but also more fun and interesting to use than its parent.

I’ve had a chance to use the app for the past 24 hours and can report that it generally works well, although there are a few areas and features that are rough around the edges. Mapquest’s SVP & GM Christian Dwyer told me he is pleased with the app but pointed out that it’s a “work in progress.”

In discussing the performance and success of the Mapquest iPhone app Dwyer said that it has seen “millions of downloads” and is used “at least at parity” with Google’s mapping app on the Apple device. Beyond this, Mapquest reports that 8.6 million people use Mapquest’s mobile site, 1.4 million of whom are on Android handsets. That growing Android user base was the impetus for creating the native Android app.

Here are some screens from the new Android app:

The following are the major features of the app:

• Voice-guided/Turn-by-turn Navigation: The phone speaks directions regarding where and when to make a turn
• Voice Search: Drivers can speak the desired destination for search and directions
• Map Toolbar: Easily find restaurants, coffee shops, gas stations and parking with one click
• Walking & Driving Directions: Recommends the best route and rotates the map based on orientation of travel
• Live Traffic Flow/Incidents: Extensive coverage updated every 5 minutes

The OpenStreetMap feature — Mapquest has created a “parallel universe” of maps online using OpenStreetMap data — enables users to correct and contribute data, as well as providing international maps and directions. Once the device crosses out of the US the OpenStreetMap data kick in, although they’re available to US users as well.

Personalization is one feature not yet present on Mapquest’s Android app however it is present in the iPhone app (“My Places”). Yet it’s coming, as are a range of new features and content, which probably will include deals according to Dwyer. He also told me that third party developers are showing interest  in partnering with Mapquest as an alternative to defaulting to Google’s maps and navigation.

Like the iPhone app, users can search for businesses or points of interest by keyword or category. They can also browse by using icons at the bottom of the screen (pictured above). Each business profile page features rich content and the ability to call or navigate to a business. Some of the data on these pages are from IAC’s CityGrid.

As a viable navigation app and substitute for some of the paid products in the market, Mapquest, together with Google Navigation and Nokia’s free Ovi Maps, put further pressure on the PND vendors and paid subscription model (e.g., VZ Navigator) and force companies such as TeleNav to become more creative and inventive to justify their pricing. Android users can get the app by scanning the QR code below:

There’s a new look and feel, a new back end, a single search box and a new “brand.” Mapquest is the number two mapping site; Google having toppled it from atop the mapping throne in early 2009 after years of complacency and “feature neglect” at the AOL-owned property.

But now with a new boss at AOL, fewer ads and a new focus on the consumer experience, Mapquest hopes to build new or renewed momentum. This is what’s new according to Mapquest:

• One-box search for finding directions, maps and businesses;
• Enhanced My Maps with a simplified login process using existing services (AOL, OpenID, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter);
• The ability to easily save and customize information, including My Maps trip itineraries, and share it with friends via social networks, including: Facebook and Twitter;
• Ways to plan and personalize travel with notes, anecdotes, landmarks and short cuts; and
• Integration of Patch’s directory information into MapQuest’s search results (e.g. restaurants, stores, government offices, local services, parks and schools).

The new Mapquest (the lower-case “Q” is intentional) looks like this:

The graphic immediately above depicts “360 View,” Mapquest’s answer to Google Street View and Bing Street Side, which debuted at the end of last year.

There are some nice search features that neither Google nor Bing offer on their mapping sites. Users can search multiple times within a map and see all the results layered or plotted in different colors simultaneously: e.g., movies, pizza, ATMs, parking. There’s also a bar that provides one click access to popular local search categories on the map: e.g., restaurants, cafes, retail, etc.

Under CEO Tim Armstrong AOL has put renewed emphasis on local (e.g., Patch) and I asked Mapquest GM Christian Dwyer whether the company recognized the importance of Mapquest and its role in AOL’s local strategy. He said yes (what’s he going to say?) and that there would be new energy and focus on the property as part of this larger strategy. I hope for AOL’s sake that’s all true.

The company is updating all its mobile apps, including its iPhone app, in the near future as well.

The simplification of search on Mapquest and the better-looking map should help defend the site against its better-funded rivals. However it’s unclear whether any of these changes or feature upgrades will strike people as interesting or novel enough to win back some of the lost usage from Google.

Now, with former Googler Tim Armstrong at the helm, the company’s independent strategy is focused on “premium content,” local information, advertising and “communications” (IM, etc.). AOL will continue to manage the decline of its ISP business over time. The positioning of the company makes it quite analogous to Yahoo, which is fighting for the same types of consumer usage and display ad dollars.

The company’s new mission statement is “To inform, entertain, and connect the world.”

AOL now employs more than 2000 full or part-time writers creating content across scores of sites. The company has just hired high profile NY Times tech journalist Saul Hansell to run Seed.com, the company’s new content management (and acquisition) platform. He will also be managing all those writers indirectly as well.

The strategy has many risks. While AOL is one of the top 5 US consumer destinations and owns the largest online ad network in the world, very few of its brands or sites occupies a leadership position any longer. MapQuest was surpassed this year by Google and there are rumors it may even be sold. I’m not sure whether AIM still tops the US IM market, it may. But most of AOL’s marquee properties, save a few, are diminished from what they once were.

AOL doesn’t really have a social media asset (unless you’re talking about IM; Bebo is an also-ran). Its video sites are losing share. Its local assets are many and varied but in a way incoherent; and if the company sells MapQuest (or keeps it and neglects it) it won’t succeed there either. Its share of search is flat-to-declining and there’s very little being done in the mobile arena. It owns mobile ad network Third Screen, but there’s little going on in the way of innovation or competitive offerings on the consumer side.

Tim Armstrong and team have their work cut out for them.

Among other things, they have to decide how much to try and focus on rebuilding the AOL brand or focus on supporting and building individual, subsidiary brands. The latter approach had been the strategy given the “Internet with training wheels” association that had come to be attached to AOL. But it would be unwise to not try to update and reinvent the AOL brand itself, which the company seems to be trying to do.

Another decision that Tim A. & Co. will  need to make is who will support their search engine: Google or Microsoft?

Google invested $1 billion for a 5 percent stake in AOL in 2005 to block Microsoft from buying the company or using the portal to boost search market share. AOL was then Google’s largest partner and the investment made a great deal of sense. Today, arguably, Google doesn’t need AOL as much, even though Bing is better and much  more competitive than Live Search was then. Google wrote down the value of the AOL investment by roughly 70% not long ago, reflecting the diminished value of the AOL property overall. Prior to the spin off, TimeWarner bought it back for $283 million.

Next year Google’s search deal with AOL expires. Microsoft will want to capture that relationship and traffic. Tim Armstrong will want to play both off against each other and start a bidding war of sorts. But I suspect both Microsoft and Google will be reluctant to engage in one. My hunch is that Microsoft, which is the “hungrier” of the two parties, may emerge the victor. But it remains to be seen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yesterday Google announced a new live search downloadable client for the BlackBerry. MapQuest also introduced an improved mobile client for BlackBerry devices in conjunction with the trade show. (Yesterday Yahoo made two announcements connected to the iPhone.)

I wasn’t able to confirm whether Live Search now becomes the default provider for BlackBerry but that’s how it appears from the announcement. As part of the deal there’s also going to be a deeper integration of Live Search local data into Blackberry Maps.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson, search results obtained from the BlackBerry Live Search integration will be the same mobile internet results as currently available through mobile.live.com.

The MapQuest 4 Mobile client (also for BlackBerry devices) emphasizes maps & directions — one of the top consumer usage categories in mobile — but offers local business search as well. In addition it has a “GPS Find Me” feature that allows a user to locate him or herself and then obtain directions to any destination from that point. It also tracks users as they progress along the route toward that destination.

While less innovative than the iPhone, BlackBerry is a critical device because it owns by far the largest market share for smartphones in the US (Nokia does globally). IDC reported earlier this week that BlackBerry had 53.6 percent of the U.S. market for smartphones in the second quarter, up from 44.5 percent in the first quarter.

AOL also sees MapQuest Local as a kind of open platform that will increasingly allow third parties to distribute their locally relevant content to MapQuest’s 48 million monthly users. While there are some conceptually similar things in the works from others, this is a very fresh and compelling approach to local.

There’s no search box yet but that’s coming. I’ve got more discussion on my personal blog Screenwerk.

Separately in association with the mobile CTIA conference, AOL announced the release of Truveo video search for WAP browsers. There’s already an iPhone version of Truveo.

From the release:

Starting today, consumers can access the Truveo Mobile Video Search beta site from RTSP-supported (Real Time Streaming Protocol) mobile phones by going to http://wap.aol.com/truveo. The new mobile video search site taps into Truveo’s industry-leading index and makes it possible for consumers to search and browse through millions of videos on more than 300 websites whose content has been optimized for mobile devices.