Virtual Earth

My Urbana Crime Maps page (description here) had fallen into disrepair as of late. Yahoo changed some of their APIs for their maps, breaking what I had up. Their new apis are (in my opinion) more cumbersome to use, and have less functionality than the previous ones. A friend recently told me that Microsoft Live Maps (Virtual Earth) has Bird's Eye images available for Urbana, so I went to check out the api. Microsoft wins for best API yet again. They are rarely first out with a product, but when they do come out with one, the API and documentation (and demos) for the product are always top-notch. It took me literally 30 minutes to update my app to use the VE api vs Yahoo's (and 20 minutes to write up this post).

So, the score in API ease-of-use for mapping is: Microsoft > Yahoo > Google

That is all.