Google maps vs. Yahoo! maps permalinks

Yesterday I showed Alex my Google maps vs. Yahoo! maps side-by-side comparision tool that I created so people can easily compare Google maps and Yahoo! maps. And right at that moment I realized that I never posted about it in this blog so here it is.
Alex suggested to add links to both sites so people can go and check ogirinal thing, and finally I got that solved so now you can see “G” and “Y” next to main permalink (see screengrab).

I can say that I enjoy JavaScript development which is a weird thing for a server side developer to say but I stopped using JS (about 10 years ago) only because it was so puny as a technology and now I’m coming to AJAX and JS web services because they really allow making cool stuff pretty easily – whole project took approximately 20 hours of work (spread over a couple of weeks) including learning both APIs, setting up hosting and writing this post.

So please, come and enjoy the fun of searching for differences (coordinates permalink will allow you to link to current position). You can post them as comments to this blog for now, special interface integrated into main page is coming in future releases.

P.S. Looks like Google is not using zoom level in their URL but viewport size instead, also it seams that Google maps quality is much better then they provide with API while Yahoo! is letting you use their production imagery (+1 to Yahoo!).

P.P.S. I had hard time figuring our how to point to Yahoo’s plain maps service so I put a link to their Flash based beta which is noticebly slower on my computer. I’ll be happy to add plain version link if someone will give me a clue how to pass it all parameters.

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