Top Web 2.0 Mapping Applications of 2006

Over the Holidays, I thought, " Wow!  2006 was a year of rapid development in online mapping.  I decided to compile a top ten list of new, interesting, and/or useful services that have advanced online mapping.

1) HotPads – (Sorry! We had to put it first.)  This (our) rental housing search site offers cartoon-like maps, free-to-post and free-to-search rental property listings, and neighborhood search tools that outline neighborhoods and other areas on the maps and provide Wikipedia articles and demographic statistics.

2) Microsoft Live.com 3-D Mapping – It is an in-browser (only IE) & higher-definition rival to GoogleEarth. The 3-D building rendering is incredible.

3) Zillow – This was the first site to offer home valuations estimates (They call them “Zestimates”). Estimates float over the tops of homes on Map, Aerial, or Hybrid views. Despite the inevitable inaccuracy of some of the estimates, they are a great starting point. Zillow recently began letting users post free for-sale listings.

4) Ask City – This offers the most comprehensive local search service to date. Input a business category, movie, or event and an area, and Ask City outlines the area and plots comprehensive search results on the map.

5) Panoramio – This photo sharing service lets users upload pictures they taken around the world and geo-codes the pictures on the map. This makes for entertaining and informative browsing.

6) Wayfaring – This map-based social networking site let’s users create custom maps (with their own points of interest) to share with friends and other users. This site has a lot of potential. Imagine sending out-of-town guests a custom map of your favorite hot spots, or just sharing a favorite pub-crawl route.

7) WikiMapia – WikiMapia mashes Wikipedia articles with Google Maps, adding another dimension to “The Free Encyclopedia.”

8) Real Time Earthquake Map – This site uses Yahoo Maps to show the location of every 2.5+ earthquake that has occurred in the world in the previous seven days. I’m not sure that the public has a use for this site, but it is very cool.

9) Flickr Maps – Flickr’s location based photo sharing geo-codes a good share of Flickr’s photo database. This site has by far the largest database of geo-coded photos.

10) Neighboroo – This site displays demographic and area information in and easy to search “heat maps” format. You can compare different areas based on Lifestyle, Politics, Crime, Elementary School Ranking, Air Quality, Home Price, Cost of Living, Commute Time, Tax Rates, Demographics, etc.

Comments

[Drew M from Zillow]

John-
Thanks for mentioning Zillow in this post (and great list overall). It certainly has been a remarkable year in terms of compelling mapping applications that have come online for consumers.

[Neighboroo]

Thanks for including us! We just added a bunch more stuff and hope in 2007 we continue to make it easier and easier for people to look up characteristics about their surrounding areas.