Nestoria Blog

Fellow Nestors!

We’re continually scanning the darkest reaches of the internet to find new technologies that might make finding a home easier. This of course means keeping a keen eye on innovation in the online mapping sector, and speaking with thought leaders.

This week we were very pleased to see that Microsoft significantly upgraded their Visual Earth product. Amongst the improvements, you can now easily dump data onto an MS Live map via GeoRSS or KML. Put simply, if you like you can browse properties to buy or rent from Nestoria on MS Live.

Here’s a screenshot of an example where we’ve taken the GeoRSS feed of properties for sale in Dover and very easily layered it onto an MS Live map:

As before, we have no plans to switch away from Google maps, but it’s great to see that Microsoft (and Yahoo! with their recent maps upgrade) aren’t conceding this space, that they continue to innovate and improve their offering. Here’s a more detailed overview of all the new features and fixes

Interesting times my friends. While we continue to see the expected innovation from nimble start ups (a group in which we too hope to fall), and the open source community (good things keep happening over at OpenStreetMap - see this recent comparison of open source versus traditionally gathered map data), but we’re also seeing a continual stream of advanced features from the big internet firms.

Just to recap some of the things we here at Nestoria have been impressed with in just the last few months:

• Yahoo’s publicly available User Interface library and the community behind it make “wow”ish frontend development easier than ever.
• Facebook’s platform allows anyone to simply and easily reach exponentially growing Facebook audience (For those late to the party, please check out the Nestoria Facebook apps). All across the world other social networks (including Google’s orkut) are racing to follow Facebook’s example.
• Amazon continues to extend and improve their distributed storage and server architecture.

Where will this all lead? Impossible to say, but it is clear that internet users everywhere are the winners.