It's difficult to interpret this mapquest version of live traffic conditions. They are showing the traffic on every tiny street all at the same time, not just major roads and highways, so it's hard to see what's even on the map at all. Google maps does a better job of leaving the smaller streets out of the traffic image, and then displaying them only when you zoom in.
The "360 view" (like Google's Street View) data for my city (Toronto) is wildly out of date. Across the office where I work there is an entire entertainment center complete with a 50 story condo on top -- which is entirely missing (and still shows a parking lot with cars parked in it) on MapQuest 360.
[edit: from the looks of some movie billboards at this intersection and a few other hints, it looks like the data is from mid-2006].
[edit 2: I just checked my own neighborhood and the building I currently live in, along with the neighboring building are both not yet built. Two condo towers south of my building are still only half-way built. MapQuest Maps == Street View Wayback Machine?]
I checked my house and found that the 360 view is about 2.5 years old. I can tell this pretty accurately because of a remodel we were doing at the time.
If by the title meaning that MapQuest is just getting into 21st Century in terms of design, then I agree. It's way too messy of a layout and the icons feel too generic. Come on MapQuest, do less!
Doesn't have any of the streets by my place in Tokyo. Google's maps of the area show every building and streets that are no wider than a foot path.
Confusingly, it also shows tons of streets as dead ends. Two dead ends will almost meet when in fact the street continues right through. I wonder if they generated these maps algorithmically.
Here's an example from an area just outside Shibuya:
I just get a blank, white page. I would expect a 21st century design to perhaps have a fallback in case JS is turned off, or even a simple "please turn on Javascript" message.
Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted, I'll say this: I've always maintained that sites need to gracefully handle the absence of javascript. In the past, (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788856), people have correctly pointed out that not all startups have enough time and money to burn on handling a few percent of the population that keep their JS off. But I still think a huge site like MapQuest needs to be able to gracefully degrade, ESPECIALLY if it wants to compete with Google and Bing maps.
I agree with you. I use NoScript, I don't use Javascript on a site I've never visited before. And MapQuest just showed... nothing. As if it was a horrible server error (some PHP sites show a blank page when the PHP goes tits up).
If I wasn't interested to see what they were doing, I would have been gone by now.
This is a horrible introduction to people who accidentally stumble onto the site.
No offense, but it's not a demographic worth catering to. It's not a malware site, it's mapquest. Anyone who accidentally stumbles onto the site will have javascript turned on.
Surprisingly pleasant. I'm a big fan of the hashmark URL updates. It's a subtle feature but its necessity becomes glaringly obvious when trying to share google maps results.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] thread[edit: from the looks of some movie billboards at this intersection and a few other hints, it looks like the data is from mid-2006].
[edit 2: I just checked my own neighborhood and the building I currently live in, along with the neighboring building are both not yet built. Two condo towers south of my building are still only half-way built. MapQuest Maps == Street View Wayback Machine?]
Confusingly, it also shows tons of streets as dead ends. Two dead ends will almost meet when in fact the street continues right through. I wonder if they generated these maps algorithmically.
Here's an example from an area just outside Shibuya:
http://mapq.st/h/6-L75ReYU9
(I do like the mapquest owned short links though)
Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted, I'll say this: I've always maintained that sites need to gracefully handle the absence of javascript. In the past, (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788856), people have correctly pointed out that not all startups have enough time and money to burn on handling a few percent of the population that keep their JS off. But I still think a huge site like MapQuest needs to be able to gracefully degrade, ESPECIALLY if it wants to compete with Google and Bing maps.
If I wasn't interested to see what they were doing, I would have been gone by now.
This is a horrible introduction to people who accidentally stumble onto the site.
Without this fixed, it is not going to be much of a challenge to google.