Sure, map sites are generally pretty similar. You can see maps, find business listings, get driving directions, see images and stuff like that. But it’s actually more complicated than that.

At least it was for me.

My wife and I recently visited Maui, Hawaii for the first time. We spent a week on the island celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary and, after getting advice from all of our family and friends, we had enough must-sees and must-dos to fill a month there.

After we decided how we wanted to spend our week, my job was to plan/map it out. It soon became a study in the differences between Google Maps and Bing Maps – the two sites I relied on most heavily. (A third mapping service was helpful once we were on the island.) Here’s a look at the strengths and weaknesses of two major mapping services — a summer vacation showdown, if you will.

Basic Mapping: Google Maps vs. Bing Maps

As much as I love some of the cool stuff that Bing Maps offers, I’m usually a Google Maps user. And there’s one main reason for that: When it comes to basic mapping, the most fundamental piece of the puzzle, Google’s maps are much more readable and usable than Bing’s. Consider these two screenshots showing Kahului, the area immediately around Maui’s main airport.

Google Maps: Kahului, HI

Bing Maps: Kahului, HI

To my eyes, the Google map is more visually attractive and, therefore, much easier to read and use. The wording and labels stand out more, main roads and minor roads are delineated more clearly and colors are used more effectively to indicate things like the airport and various malls/shopping centers.

Justin O’Beirne, who writes the excellent 41latitude.com blog about mapping technology, drew the same conclusion during a series of posts comparing Google, Bing and Yahoo maps:

Google’s labels seem to “pop” much more than the other sites’ labels. Major cities also seem to stand out much more. And whenever you’re quickly scanning the maps, the label you’re searching for seems to stand out just a little sooner on Google’s maps.

For my vacation planning purposes, the winner on this point is clear.

Winner, Basic Mapping: Google

Business Listings & Directions

For our week-long trip, we needed a lot of access to local business information. Even though we did plenty of advance research choosing some places, we still needed to find local restaurants, places to shop for gifts to bring home, places to find snorkeling gear and so forth.

We used both desktop and mobile devices for these searches and, for the most part, both Google and Bing provided very good local business results and directions to get there. There was one notable exception: On a search for “lahaina restaurants,” Bing inexcusably showed us results that covered the entire western coast of Maui, while Google nailed the targeting right into Lahaina’s not-so-big footprint.

Bing Maps: “lahaina restaurants”

Google Maps: “lahaina restaurants”

At the end of our trip, a third mapping service came into play for a separate business-related search. We needed to find a gas station near the airport before we returned our rental car. This was a mobile search, so I fired up the MapQuest iPhone app because it has several presets for different types of businesses — including gas stations. A search for “ogg” (the airport code) combined with the gas stations preset button led us exactly where we needed to go.

Yes, it’s true that the Yelp and Google Places iPhone apps also have “gas station” presets, but there’s a difference: Those apps default to your current location and it’s impossible to use the presets to search a different area. (Well, it’s not impossible, but it’s a hassle to have to turn off location awareness first, especially when the whole point behind the apps is to search for things near you.) It’s also true that a desktop search on Google Maps for “gas stations near ogg” would’ve produced equally good results (a desktop search on Bing isn’t nearly as good for that phrase), but this was a specific mobile search scenario, we were on the other side of the island, and I knew that MapQuest’s app offered me the quickest access to what I wanted to find.

Winner, Business Listings and Directories: none (Google and MapQuest tied)

Imagery

Bing has invested a lot of time and money into the imagery aspects of Bing Maps, and it really showed during our trip planning. Since we were going to an unfamiliar place and planning several unfamiliar drives/adventures, I wanted to visualize what we were doing as much as possible.

For example, one friend gave us a tip about a great place to snorkel that’s not crowded and is filled with fish and sea turtles. It’s a small bay where the Honokeana Cove condominiums sit, but you don’t have to be renting there to use the small beach and get in the water. This isn’t the kind of tip you find in the Maui guidebooks, so in addition to finding where it is and how to get there, I wanted to see this place online first so I could be sure that we later found the right place.

Both Google and Bing took me right to the condominiums when I searched for “honokeana cove.” But Bing separated itself dramatically when I started looking at imagery.

With Google, I was limited to the standard, overhead satellite image. It was somewhat helpful to give me a sense of what I should see when we visited, but as with much satellite imagery, it gets blurrier the more you zoom in and doesn’t offer a very detailed view.

Google Earth wasn’t any better.

But this is where Bing shined. As I zoomed in, Bing Maps automatically shifted me from map view — not to the overhead satellite image, but to its 45-degree imagery. And unlike satellite images, the closer I zoomed in, the more detail I saw about parking, the walking path, and so much more. I could also spin around to see the area from different angles, like this:

Bing’s 45-degree aerial images have been around a long time — Microsoft partnered with Pictometry for those images way back in 2005. Google only added 45-degree images to Google Maps last summer, and the feature is still only available in limited cities around the world (listed on this official list/map that Google maintains).

One more thing: While looking at these 45-degree angle images, I decided to click into Bing’s “Map Apps” collection and found a Photosynth set of images uploaded by a user. I’ll spare you all 24 photos and just show one screenshot:

The Photosynth imagery was another helpful feature that let me see my search results much more robustly than Google’s overhead satellite images.

That’s not to say Bing was the only source of helpful images. In fact, while Bing has been pouring its energy into aerial images, Google has been focusing on ground images in recent years via its Google Street View service.

Street View proved helpful as we were planning to drive Maui’s famous “Road to Hana.” We used an excellent book called Maui Revealed that points out dozens of diversions like waterfalls, ponds and other places where you can stop to enjoy amazing scenery. But finding some of these spots is difficult; they’re sometimes as specific as “park your car XX feet after the guard rail and look for a path in the woods.”

For example, the instructions to find one waterfall that we wanted to see are as follows:

At 8/10 mile past the 10-mile marker on the ocean side of the road is a turnout with a telephone pole. There’s a well-worn path to the right.

Seriously??!! Well, that sounded pretty daunting until I fired up Google Street View, poked along the highway step-by-step and eventually found this:

That’s the spot we wanted, and finding it on Street View made me a lot more confident that we’d find it while driving, too. Google helped out like this with a couple different diversions we wanted to explore, which was cool. What wasn’t cool is that there are substantial sections of the Road to Hana where Street View isn’t available.

What’s interesting to consider is the two different approaches Google and Microsoft have taken to map-related imagery. Google’s focus has been on Street View, while aerial imagery is lagging behind and seems like a secondary project. MSFT/Bing has taken the opposite approach, with a heavy emphasis on aerial imagery, while only recently making public plans to expand its Streetside ground photo service.

In any case, because Street View came up a bit short, and because Bing’s 45-degree aerial imagery and Photosynth are much better than what Google offers, the choice here goes to the underdog.

Winner, Imagery: Bing

Final Thoughts

If there was a point system attached to these categories, Google would probably get a slight win over Bing based on its performance in basic mapping as well as business listings/directions. But Bing’s emphasis on aerial imagery was extremely helpful with vacation planning, and MapQuest’s search presets also got us the local info we were looking for right when we needed it.

In other words, there’s no obvious winner in this maps showdown.

If anything, this proves that there are pretty substantial differences still between some of the major mapping/search services. Depending on your situation (what you’re looking for, whether you’re on the desktop or mobile), you might find better information and results by switching from your favorite map site to something else. It’s not convenient, but it’s the current state of search and mapping services.

It leaves me wondering: Will we ever have one mapping service to rule them all?

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

It’s probably not something that you can wrap your head around pretty quickly. It’s also not something you can describe in quick, easily digestible terms.

“It” is a new Microsoft Bing effort called Read/Write World that has some pretty lofty goals: things like indexing and connecting all of the world’s “geo-linked media.” And not just indexing and connecting all this media, but also making it easy to use and consume, too, on any platform and type of device.

It’s stuff like maps, photos, panoramas, movies, business listings — almost anything that can be tied to a physical location — and tying it together inside a pretty box that’s easy to open. The clichéd explanation would be this: It’s like your favorite mapping service on steroids.

This three-minute video gives a good idea of what it might look like, with its combination of mapping, Streetside photos, Photosynth panoramas, interior business videos and such.

Untitled from Read/Write World on Vimeo.

There’s obviously a technical element involved in making all this happen, and Microsoft has created a new programming language called RML — Reality Markup Language — to describe the geographic relationships between different pieces of media. And just in case I’ve oversimplified all of this so far, here’s how Microsoft itself describes the project:

The goals of a Read/Write World viewer are ambitious. Our prototype shows the importance of being able to combine nadir, oblique, and “human scale” map imagery with photos (flat or multi-resolution), panoramas (equirectangular, cylindrical, cubemapped, …) video in different formats, models (locally or globally textured), and annotations. In order to span and connect these diverse representations, we’ve invented a little glue language that we modestly call “Reality Markup Language” (RML).

It sounds a bit heavy on the programming/dev side of things, but the Bing blog post also mentions things that sound like they’ll be geared toward us regular folks, like

• Being able to simply create immersive experiences from your own and others’ photos, videos, panoramas, and models
• “Fixing” the world, when the official imagery of your street is out of date.
• Visually mapping your business, your rental apartment, or your local strip mall, and allowing everyone to explore it.

There’s no question that the idea behind Read/Write World is ambitious and, if you watched the video above, you probably saw the potential for something pretty cool. But making this something that both developers and laypeople can contribute to would be quite an accomplishment.

With the Photosynth app, users can create panoramic images inside the app — no additional stitching software required — and upload them directly into Bing Maps. (Or to Facebook if you prefer.) It looks better than I’m describing it, so watch at about the :20 mark of this Microsoft video to see how the app works.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&#038;vid=286219d4-1988-4479-816f-12e36d18b514&#038;src=SLPl:embed:&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Microsoft Photosynth App – April 2011">Video: Microsoft Photosynth App – April 2011</a>

If users upload panoramas to Bing Maps and tag them with the name of the location (a museum, stadium, store, etc.), the photosynth panorama will show up alongside the business/location’s listing.

It can be a compelling way to introduce a location to potential visitors. Consider this screenshot below of a Photosynth panorama of a snorkeling spot on Maui. The images are hosted on Photosynth.net, but I discovered the panorama via a link in Bing Maps while planning for a trip there later this year.

The Photosynth app is currently available for Apple devices running iOS 4.1 or later, and a Windows Phone version is in the works, too.

There are in fact so many things rolling out simultaneously that it’s a bit overwhelming. Accordingly in this post I’m just going to offer up an edited version of the information provided by Microsoft. We’ll explore selected features and products later in subsequent posts.

Facebook-related:

• Like Annotations: Search results will now show which links on the main results page have been “liked” by a person’s Facebook friends.
• Social annotations: Bing is bringing “like” data into core search across all queries. Search results will now show which links on the search engine results page have been “liked” by a person’s Facebook friends. This feature will show what a person’s friends “liked” on the main results page and will be different for each user.

Local enhancements:

• OpenTable will be integrated into the local search vertical, allowing people to book reservations from the restaurant details page in Bing.
• FanSnap will be integrated into the local search vertical, allowing people to purchase tickets to a concert or sporting event through the events details page in Bing.
• Everyscape integration: Interior Views on business profile pages will allow people to see inside local restaurants and businesses with 360-degree panoramic views. These views will be accessible from the local search results. This feature will initially be available in Seattle, San Francisco and Boston.

Bing Maps:

• Bing Maps will feature stronger differentiation and contrast between major and minor city streets so streets “pop” out more
• Venue maps provide detailed maps and directories of venues, such as shopping malls, airports, museums and college campuses, within Bing Maps.
• Improved Landmark Listings: Users now get contact information, related businesses, and landmark details immediately from the search for a landmark.
• Transit Routing: Transit directions will be available for the AJAX experience. Users can choose their desired departure time and choose among multiple routes with similar travel time. The initial cities in the release are: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Newark Metro Area, New York Metro Area, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver BC, and Washington DC.
• Map Interface: The new Bing.com/Maps experience allows rich features to be more accessible by all users. In this release, the Map Apps button and Gallery can be viewed in the Bing.com/Maps (AJAX) site – once a Map App is opened, users without Silverlight will be shown how to download Silverlight to access Map Apps.
• Map App Search: Adds a search box to find map apps within the app gallery.
• The left-rail of the AJAX site will now guide users to some of Bing Maps’ key features – directions, traffic, business lookup, and map apps – and helps map apps to be more discoverable within the core experience.

Mobile (iPhone):

• Autosuggest: Bing intelligently narrows and refines restaurant and movie searches by suggesting query strings to help people plan the perfect night out.
• Bing Vision: Bring an object into the [camera] viewfinder, hold it still and Bing will detect text and present a highlighter tool to select words for a search. If the object has a barcode, Bing will instantly return product results. Search for a nearby business listing by pointing your camera at a landmark.
• Check-in: Share your current location with friends and family via Facebook, foursquare or Windows Live Activity Stream.
• iPhone Apps: Surfaces iPhone apps in search results, when relevant.
• Plans: From the Bing homepage or a local search result, people can plan a night out and share the plan with friends via Facebook, who can comment or join the plan.
• Opentable and Grubhub integration: With the integration of Opentable and Grubhub into Bing for Mobile, once you find your restaurant of choice, you can reserve a table on OpenTable or order takeout from Grubhub without leaving the Bing app.
• Real-Time Transit Predictions: Real-time updates for Boston, San Francisco and Seattle allow commuters to see if transit options are on schedule, early or delayed, with predictions for arrival times.
• Reminders: Create a “to-do” list and set reminders to receive alerts when near a specific location.
• Enhanced StreetSide: Helps people orient themselves in unfamiliar places by stitching together and panning across street-level imagery of businesses, addresses or landmarks.

Mobile (Android):

• Search Widget: expands beyond the ability to search contacts, apps, audio files or the Web and includes ability to search third party apps that register to be searchable.
• Share Command: Share content with friends using any loaded app that can accept and share content (images, URLs, etc.).
• Opentable and Grubhub integration: With the integration of Opentable and Grubhub into Bing for Mobile, you can reserve a table on OpenTable or order takeout from Grubhub without leaving the Bing app.

Travel:

• Flight Summary: Displays an instant set of airfares as users enter flight details such as cities and dates. This provides people with an approximate cost for their trip without having to complete a full search, and allows people to see alternative travel options that could help save money or provide a better value.
• Flight Answers: Flight search options have expanded to include Flight Answers, which utilize flight search and top deals. Users can type “I want to fly to Paris next January” and find a form pre-filled with January dates, or try “fly SEA to SFO on Dec 9 returning Dec 12” to find precise flight information. Users can also construct queries around one-way, non-stop and airline-specific requests.
• Destination Pages: Bing’s new destination pages pull together all the key information on a city, saving you time and energy: flights and hotels, images, attractions, events, maps and a weather overview.
• Attraction Answers: Bing attractions now features 60K attractions Worldwide, ~20K attractions US.

Image search:

• Bing’s new image search organizes images in a more intuitive way and brings back additional categories
• Collage Answers: Richer instant answers across entertainment verticals including music, movies, TV and Games.

Entertainment:

• Landing pages for movies and television shows will now include organizational tabs to allow people to explore more detailed information such as trailers, reviews and showtimes.
• Extended TV listings and episode guides will be integrated into search results, along with TV clips and show information.

Whew . . . Lots of this stuff is really useful and “cool.” The challenge for Bing and Microsoft is to make ordinary users aware of it. Map Apps, for example, are really interesting and engaging but they’ve been “hidden” behind the Sliverlight wall and not well promoted by Microsoft. Now the company is bringing some of that experience into the non-Silverlight version of Bing Maps.

Conceptually almost all these changes and upgrades are intended to make good on the notion of Bing being a “decision engine” and help people put together necessary information or take the next step in a process or conduct a transaction directly on the site or mobile app. As I said, we’ll drill down on some of these features later in more depth.

Postscript: See our follow-up pieces on some of these announcements:

• Bing Releases Version 2.0 Of iPhone App.
• Bing Expands Use Of Facebook ‘Likes’ In Search Results
• Bing Improves Image Search With Tabs & Page Preview
• Bing Travel Adds Attraction Answers, Gives Destination One-Boxes

Photosynth is a tool that lets users upload regular photos and then stitches those photos into 3-D scenes of whatever the photos depict. Our Greg Sterling has previously shown some Photosynth screenshots and called it “pretty amazing stuff.”

Microsoft says that two early customers using Photosynth via its integration with Virtual Earth are NASA and VisitBrighton. Here’s one screenshot of how NASA is using Photosynth to show the International Space Station:

On a more earthly level, in addition to the Brighton Tourism example, you could imagine real estate web sites that already use Virtual Earth for mapping adding the Photosynth technology to show 3-D tours of individual properties. On the Virtual Earth web site, Microsoft also suggests a number of other ways businesses can use Photosynth. You can watch Microsoft’s YouTube video to see all of this in action.

If you’re not a potential business customer, but want to see Photosynth in action, it was integrated into Live Maps late last year. Go virtually to Seattle and look for the Photosynth links in the left content window.

The imagery allows you to get in very close, so you can see how far your hotel is exactly from the beach in Cannes, for example:

Live Search Maps has not received as much attention as Google Maps but the site has improved greatly over time in terms of usability and accuracy. It’s also much faster than before.

Both Google and Microsoft offer satellite imagery, which is often not that useful to ordinary people in practical situations. Google has StreetView, which can be extremely useful in a range of cases. But Google has nothing between the overhead satellite view and StreetView. Microsoft, despite rumors, doesn’t have a street-level offering (it will over the long term, perhaps through an acquisition) but it does offer a “Birds Eye” view, which as you see in the bottom two images above is much more helpful than satellite imagery.

Microsoft is going to find its images from someone else, namely, you. Essentially GeoSynth is going to function as a mashup between Microsoft’s Virtual Earth maps system and its PhotoSynth technology.

(See clarification below.)

However, GeoSynth has been around since last October. The new implementation would seem to be a stepped up version of what Microsoft has already been doing. Photosynth images are currently available on Live Search Maps:

When Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye photography launched in 2006 it trumped Google Map’s satellite imagery. But the novelty of that faded when StreetView showed up with the promise of an even closer look at buildings and locations in major cities around the world.

When Google was first developing StreetView Microsoft also was testing StreetSide, a comparable offering that showed similar street-level imagery. It never was formally rolled out. Yet Microsoft apparently has continued to collect this imagery using cars with mounted cameras. None of it has shown up on Live Search Maps (as far as I know).

The Fast Company article suggests that Microsoft is now preparing to make Photosynth a more direct competitor with Google’s StreetView. There are some challenges in doing that that revolve around getting good images from people and making the Photosynth integration with Live Search Maps a bit better, but it’s a very provocative idea.

Update and clarification: I just received the following statement from a Microsoft spokesperson:

“Johannes Kebeck’s comments were taken somewhat out of context. GeoSynth is a standalone version of Photosynth offered by Vexcel that is licensed to public sector companies. There are no immediate plans to integrate GeoSynth into the consumer facing version of Live Search Maps.  Photosynth collections are already included in Live Search Maps in the U.S.”

Google’s image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location.

Google has offered images on Maps for some time, but not directly integrated into StreetView like this.

A thumbnail appears in the upper right of the StreetView image (see below). Clicking it opens a new view of the location with a horizontal scrolling bar of images. Users can click any of the images to enlarge. Google is implying it will only use a limited number of high-quality images for any location.

Currently most locations (that I checked) don’t have this feature. If Google were to add Flickr images, however, to StreetView it would instantly be more populated.

Here’s an example where the new user images do exist, for the Paris monument Arc de Triomphe:

This is additional interesting information in Google Maps and will help reinforce Google’s position as the mapping innovator. However, unknown to most people, Microsoft has this same capability too; and in many ways a much more interesting offering in the combination of Photosynth and Live Search Maps.

Here’s the Live Search Maps result for Arc de Triomphe:

Clicking on “explore collections” in the left panel takes you to a range of Photosynth imagery:

You can then explore the individual “collections” (multiple shots of a single location):

In many cases the range and detail of images (including interiors) is terrific:

Photosynth is a really compelling product but the mainstreaming of Photosynth is moving slowly. While it’s integrated into Live Maps, as I mentioned, nobody seems to know about it. In addition, the experience is more awkward and disintegrated (because it requires a special viewer) than what Google has now put together with Panoramio.

Greg covered Photosynth when it first went public, he described it as a “totally cool” tool that allows Windows users to upload photos, “the technology automatically “synths” them, creating a 3-D, 360-degree interactive photo collage of whatever the photographs depict.”

Microsoft has now integrated it with Live Maps and you can see live examples in Seattle, Vatican city, at the Leaning tower of Pisa and many more places. Greg Sterling posted additional screen captures at his personal blog.

In other Microsoft mapping news, they have added 41.07 TB worth of Virtual Earth imagery. The Microsoft Virtual Earth blog details exactly which locations have been updated. The images look crisp and sharp to me.

I’ve always been intrigued by Photosynth, since its introduction in late 2006, and what Microsoft might do with it. The consumer release is only the beginning; there are myriad academic, educational and potential commercial uses of the technology.

On the new consumer site, you can upload your photos — it only works on Windows machines (XP or Vista) but works with Firefox — and the technology automatically “synths” them, creating a 3-D, 360-degree interactive photo collage of whatever the photographs depict. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

Here are some screens of a “synth” of Seattle’s Safeco Field (which really don’t do justice to Photosynth):

Here’s one of an art gallery:

These are still images, but there’s something very “cinematic” about Photosynth. But unlike video the user can pan or zoom in on any individual image. It can thus go from very “macro” views to extreme closeups. One can imagine it as a new kind of “storytelling” medium.

The only thing vaguely similar to it is mapping site EveryScape, which takes still photographs and knits them together into a virtual version of real cities. There are intriguing ways in which sites like EveryScape or Microsoft’s own Virtual Earth can integrate Photosynth’s capabilities.

Photosynth is an exciting product but not yet as developed as Microsoft envisions. I asked Microsoft, for example, whether Flickr users could upload photos directly from their accounts into Photosynth — “not yet” was the answer. Such upgrades and developments are on the roadmap.

I’d love to see a Mac plug-in that allowed Mac users to participate as well. But putting those quibbles aside, Photosynth is one of the most compelling and genuinely unique products to come out of Redmond (other than Surface) in a long time.