I'm like a kid in a candy store. A candy store of mapping APIs, that is. Last week, I'm queitly hacking Blogdigger Local data in Google Maps, and suddenly, today, I've got not one, but two free services, one from Google and the other from Yahoo, launched at the Where 2.0 conference. A quick review:

Yahoo's repurposing of RSS for geo-data is spot-on; our Local RSS feeds already support basic lat/lon coordinates, so integration was a snap. Here's a map of recent posts in Baltimore overlayed on Yahoo Maps (just take any Local RSS feed, and pass it as the xmlsrc like this: http://api.maps.yahoo.com/Maps/V1/AnnotatedMaps?appid=blogdigger&xmlsrc=http://local.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?near=Baltimore,md ). Amazingly simple, although it appears only the first result is being rendered on the map, I'm not sure which end the problem is on. I'm a little nervous about the ymaps namespaced elements; hopefully, other mapping services will pick up on the ease of using RSS as a mapping tool, but I'd hate to have to start supporting ymaps namespace AND mapquest namespace, etc. This dataset should be sufficiently general that some consensus can be made.

Another slick feature from Yahoo is the geocoding capabilities; for applications that don't have lat/lon data, Yahoo will automatically map based on a street address. Plus, there may be free cookies involved. ;)

I've also been playing around a bit with the Google Maps API. When compared with the hacking and source-viewing of the past, it's a pleasure, and the new API gives you incredible flexibility in how and where your map data is presented. I've worked with a few of the commercial mapping packages on the market; the new Maps API is on par with those in terms of functionality, which is something.

The big difference I see between the two is that a Google Map can be embedded in your site, while Yahoo is an API for overlaying your data onto their site. It's much easier to get up and running with Yahoo; Google will still be the choice for applications that want to spend the extra time to embed maps into their own site and create more interactive applications.

It's amazing and encouraging that we've got this kind of openess coming from the big companies like Google and Yahoo (and others, of course, like Amazon). The closed systems are opening up and the benefits of making all this functionality and data available are just beginning to be realized. It's a good sign, and every indication points to the fact that things are going to get better and better.