http://fathawar.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D11B17A57999A74E!603.entry

http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!8546.entry

One last comment about Brand vs. Tech. Who is the number one online mapping provider- Google? Microsoft? Yahoo? Not by a long shot. It’s MapQuest. Why? decide for yourself. is their technology way ahead of their competitors? or is it that they have an established and trusted brand that they have built over the past dozen years?

About Google maps, Microsoft is doing a lot innovating and I’m glad you pointed out the weak point, the interface. maybe those guys do need to come over and work but it’s an entirely different type of interface.

Also, if you want hi quality images, please see the drop down on live’s image search. you can search for only images that are the same size as your desktop (looking for wallpaper) I can find all types of images that are 2560×1600. I have about 5 gigs of great things I’ve found on Images.live.com I can search for any resolution of photo I want, 1920×1200 (True HD) is a popular format.

What I’d like to see is the indexes of all the majors and the interfaces become seperate services. If I like Microsoft’s patented infinite scroll to search google index, I think all consumers would be happy if these different services were seperated. But then we get back to the photobucket-myspace trama.

But, you are right. On this Microsoft is better than Google and does have a better interface.

Maybe the image search team needs to overhaul the Maps user experience?

But Flickr’s search does a lot better for the times I’ve searched for images.

I also don’t do many image searches. Thomas Hawk would be a better one to ask about that than me.

My 2C

To be honest I’m not fully sure why they call it scratch pad, probably because it does more than just collections. Probably because it’s more than just a collections window.

Thanks for the debate, I think I’ll stick with maps.live.com.

I guess I like more functionality in the applications I use, which naturally leads to a more hefty interface.

Oh, I realize why I didn’t see them. It saved them in a down-arrow menu — my birthplace was saved under “Half Moon Bay” for instance. That’s wrong. And makes me feel stupid. Damn, I had no idea that’s where collections were being saved. Google doesn’t use down arrow menus so I always saw what I had saved.

And, why save collections in a menu called “Scratch pad?” That confused me too.

Micah, I’ve just decided you’re smarter than me. I’ll stick with Google, thanks.

I don’t remember every saying I was trying to convince anyone, I was just stating a fact that the site is not that difficult to use if you seriously try and use it like every other site that exists.

But, Scoble has requested a video on how to save a collection so here is a link (note I am already signed into my Live Account, didn’t want login while taping it) unfortunatly it’s been compressed like crazy, if you have a place I can upload the orginal I’d be happy to do so:
http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=da515efe-05ba-46f7-96c9-14f1beb8f5fa

Scoble your site alone as 9 main links on it, not to mention that they are horribly placed for an ease of use factor plus it’s stuffed between a bunch of random stuff that pretty much all blends into each other, your commenting on posts is a nightmare: “paging” it’s a great thing, we’ll like it.

Obviously you don’t claim to be a great designer or usability expert, but yet it seems if commenting on usability of other sites and saying they do a weak job, should mean your site would at least be a bit better.

I think it really comes down to branding for Microsoft, I don’t think what they are doing is work, pretty much across the board. I don’t know what they could do to be better unless I worked for them and had all the research and data needed to make an appropriate evaluation as what needs to be done.

Until you or Micah demonstrates that to me, then why should I listen to you? I’ve tried it four times so far on two different OS’s and both IE and Firefox. I can’t figure out how to get it to work, while Google’s works much simpler.

Wait, that’s your entire response to all the points Micah made? Sorry, Scoble, but that response brings to mind the scene in Planet of the Apes, where the simian judges place their hands over their eyes and ears because they don’t even want to *hear* any opposing argument. What the hell is the use of responding to your posts if you just dismiss them with “Sorry, you’re not convincing anyone” without even bothering to address the points made?

You have your head so far up Google’s posterior that you can hardly think straight. The reason one of the posters above used Caps-Lock is that it seems to be the only way to get anything through your thick skull.

ps there nothing wrong with cap locks if there is one were is keyboard 2.0 at.
thanks and god bless you

Office 2k7?
Took me all of 0.2 seconds to think of that.
Try harder next time, Welch.

Snerk. YOu have a very funny definition of “simpler”. “More obvious” and “Simpler” are not the same things. That would be why they are different words

PS DID YOU MAKE SURE THAT YOU WERE SIGN IN WHILE USING LOCAL LIVE.

FISHSTICKS!!!!!!

If you think Google and Virtual Earth have the same layouts then you aren’t looking hard enough.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has 1) Welcome 2) Collections 3) Driving directions 4) Traffic 5) Locate me 6) Share 7) Print”

FOR SOME REASON YOU HAVE OVERLOOKED THE FACT THAT GOOGLE MAPS HAS JUST ABOUT THE SAME LAYOUT AS LOCAL LIVE. AND GOOGLE TABS ARE AS FOLLOWS 1) SEARCH RESULTS 2) MY MAPS 3) TRAFFIC 4)MAP 5)SATELLITE 6) HYBRID 7)SEARCH THE MAP 8)FIND BUSINESSES 9)GET DIRECTIONS. THE SEARCH BOX IS BUILT UP WITH 5 AJAX BOXES THAT CHANGE WHEN CLICK UPON (7)SEARCH THE MAP 8)FIND BUSINESSES 9)GET DIRECTIONS).

PS DID YOU MAKE SURE THAT YOU WERE SIGN IN WHILE USING LOCAL LIVE.

THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN MORE ABOUT GOOGLE BLOG FANBOYS THEN FEATURE SETS AND UI.

The feedback you just provided in your post is priceless. It’s exactly what the folks who make Live Maps need to see so that they know how they should improve their product. (FWIW, I’ve experienced some of the same issues too!)

But here’s the rub… and this is a chicken and egg problem. If people don’t know that Live Maps exists in the first place, they’ll never use it. If they’re not using it, then they can’t provide the crucial feedback needed to the product team to improve it. A lot of the reaction to Google’s myMaps was “This is cool because it’s a new feature that no one has seen before.” And that was my point in the post, LM has had collections for some time now, but no one knew about it.

Thanks to your post for bringing attention to the usability issues. If, as a result of either of our posts, people try out LM collections and raise that same feedback to the product team, then I think we accomplished something here. Steve from the product team already commented earlier that he’s listening. That’s cool!
-Peter (aka JrzyShr Dev Guy)

But I switched back. Mysteriously, their service stopped working on the Camino browser, even though Camino uses the same rendering engine as Firefox. Yes, they’re blocking based on user agent instead of on Javascript features! So now my favorite map site is unuable in my favorite browser, not because the browser can’t support it, but because Microsoft added special code to prevent me from using it.

I would’ve left them feedback on the Live blog, but they won’t let me comment unless I create an account of some sort. Another obstacle. So I didn’t comment, and I’ve switched back to Google Maps. It just works.

No, you only need to build a good product every so often. Once your brand name gets established you can suffer some crappy products because people trust your brand. I mean look, for example you own a Sony…you own a Saturn. Not saying the Aura sucks, but for the past few years the quality of cars Saturn turned out didn’t match their brand reputation. Thus, I’m sure brand had something to do with those purchases regardless of the past quality of the product

An aside… could you thread your comments? Its really hard to process a long list of 70+ comments.

Robert Not everybody uses ie, or has users that use ie. Thus google maps is the thing i have to use being that i cannot get ie to run in Linux (a mercy i do think).

So as a map maker - I can’t use it, and to force my users to use ie sucks - imagine if you where buying a product and the browser told to logout, open a new browser, fire up the site, relogin and start again.

If ms don’t wish to make there stuff compatible that is not my problem.

Select Canada from the overview map, and then type in an address with street name, city, and province. MapPoint reports it cannot find that street/city/province in the USA.

But that’s typical of Microsoft products: the inability to do fundamental operations. Windows can’t do basic functions like rename an entire folder of file names; Word doesn’t handle line spacing correctly; etc.

http://waterhole-forma.blogspot.com/2007/01/3d-mapping-in-virtual-earth.html

google maps is a killer app :)

Everyone else: my point about branding was stupid and I retract it. Of course brand means a lot.

But, what is brand? It’s a promise built on past results. How do you get a good brand? Build a great product everytime.

How do you get a bad brand? Build a bad one over and over.

functionality-wise the product is no harder to figure out than google maps, but the real killer is speed. The same thing that kills live local search kills their maps too. The servers / bandwidth just cannot match google’s

Ummh, Microsoft Max is dead! (http://www.microsoft.com/max/)

Committees are stupid. This should surprise noone.

I’m sorry but how do yo folks that find this interface hard and confusing, even manage to use a computer at all?

Sure there are two search boxes, um so what, they clearly tell you exactly what type of search criteria should go into each one.

There are two columns, Left column (pretty standard website design concept) which contains some useful information like a link to a tour, popular searches etc. It even says “Welcome” as in hey start here if you are not sure what to do.

Right column (Its the one with the huge map in it) also pretty standard format.

Directly above the map is a navigation bar (similar to what you would find on probably 98% of websites that exist today. Each menu item is pretty clear, Collections is the only one that seems a bit un-clear but as soon as you roll over it (you know it has a dropdown because of the little down arrow) it is then pretty clear as to what it is.

Other than that the other menu items make total sense, it’s a pretty basic menu, the largest dropdown only has 4 sub items, pretty minimal compared to a lot of websites or applications for that matter.

Personally I never found “Collections” to be confusing, seems pretty straight forward (Open, New, Add Pushpin and Favorites” pretty common words to me.

If you add a new collection there are 3 textboxes you can fill out and 2 check boxes you can check, “Un-intuative”?? seriously? How do manage to do your taxes, or order food at a resturant?

As far as features go, I totally agree MS is winning. Just the fact that you have a quick link on your pushpin to zoom in to City, Street or region is the best feature ever, I messed with Google Maps for a while and couldn’t ever figure out if there was a way to do so with a simple click of the mouse.

Also the “Send in email” feature just seems like something obvious Google needs.

The maps themselves, top left corner, pretty basic easy to understand control interface, similar to googles, so should be easy to use.

The map itself also work simlar to Googles so that shouldn’t be an issue.

I’m a bit confused about people liking googles aerial maps more than MS Maps, I have looked at quite a few locations on both maps and they have the exact same photo, the cars are in the exact same place. How can one aerial photograph on one map be better than the other when they use the same images? Granted I’m sure some are updated more often than the others.

Somone had also mentioned that google has good marketing and is cool looking, have you looked at their logo? It’s one of the worst logos ever designed, it goes against every design theory out there for making a logo.

And I can’t ever recall seening “marketing” done by google, never ever. It’s pretty amazing how successful they are.

Don’t get me wrong I use google all the time, search and images mostly, other than that I find their other applications quite lacking for the kind of programmers they have working there.

Sorry for the long rant, I just wanted to explain why I’m confused at all the comments saying that the site is hard to use. C’mon if you really read what things say, and explore a bit, it’s pretty obvious and simple.

I’m guessing a lot of you have been to: http://www.neowin.net/ for instance.
Just look at how much stuff is on this page, is it hard to use and stress you out enough not to use it? I doubt it, it’s all a matter of taking the time and using it and using your brain.

OH! So THAT’s how I get to collections? I mean, it was so damned intuitive when looking at local.live.com (and I know I think “MAPS” when I look at that URL, let me tell you!)

Scoble, you are right about the user experience in MS Maps (how hard would it have been to call it that, Mr. Lombardi?). While the product has some cool features..they are pretty much undiscoverable.

Really? You seriously believe this? You think XBOX would have succeeded if it had the Microsoft or Windows brand directly associated with it? Why do you think there are XBOX, PSx, Apple fan boys?

Seriously? You mean to tell me that if I told you a product came from either Apple or Google, without telling you what it was, you wouldn’t want to look at it over say a something from Habablab Tech? To be clear, I didn’t tell you what the product was, but simply gave you the name of the company that produced it, you wouldn’t care if it came from Google or Apple, vs. say Habablab or Vandalay Industries?

Well, given the Scoble couldn’t figure out how to close Joost or how to get Google to display in English when in a foreign country, I’m not sure he’s a good model for usability testing ;-)

The frustrating thing for me is that VE worked just fine under Safari before it got absorbed into the Live family…

Thanks for the response.

LOLOLOL
Google Maps may be better than Microsoft Maps (I wouldn’t know, I use neither service), but the assertion that “brand name is irrelevant, period” is utter bullshit.

“Collections have become one of the most popular features at Live Search Maps”

I go to http://collections.live.com and I see:

To Do (22)
To Watch (34)
Tourist Guides (1)
Asia (2)
Australia (3)
Europe (26)
US and North America (41)
Food and Drink (25)
Geography (12)
History (11)
The Arts (15)

Do you consider 192 collections (if I counted right) after almost a year a success?