Mapping APIs
Mapping APIs have been around for ages now and all the big guns (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) have thrown their hat into the ring. You can even get a Google maps plugin for wordpress plugin to allow you to easily put a map in your blog.
There’s even an API that allows you to switch between using all three - but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in quite a while.
All these examples exploded onto the scene but haven’t really made any major advances, that my naked eye can see, for quite a while. Why is this? Is it that they are as good as they can possibly get? Or is development stagnant for another reason? Maybe it’s lack of data! Whilst people are forever creating mashups of this on top of that with a little bit of the other thrown in the unfortunate thing for me is that there hasn’t really been anything that has blown my mind since the very early days of DHTML maps. Somebody please prove me wrong!
Maybe it’s time for the OS to start setting the data free so that people can actually benefit from the high quality data without paying through the nose - then maybe we’ll see some great UK mashups.
