Yahoo's purchase of Flickr, the excellent photo hosting/community site, is starting to generate some interesting things. Finally. Flickr's been integrated with Yahoo Maps to allow you to "geotag" your photos - add information about where the pic was taken to the photo itself, and then display the results on a map. You can see mine here.
A colleague and I have been playing around with it today (you can see his thoughts on Flickr Maps on the Travolution Blog), and have come to the same conclusion: the quality of the maps outside the US sucks really, really badly. Happily, though, Flickr is aware of the issue:
There's been a lot of grumbling about the maps detail and coverage of Yahoo! maps outside the U.S. We definitely hear it, and the Yahoo! Local/Maps team, which happens to sit across from the Flickr team hears it (and feels it!) ... loud and clear. The maps in much of the world are not good enough yet. We agree.
But, fear not: maps are continually being upgraded and street-level detail for more countries has been in the works for a while already. Satellite imagery upgrades already happen a couple of times each month (the Earth is big, y'know) and in the months since the new Maps beta launched, they've already made significant improvements. More are coming.
So, with a bit of luck, we'll see some big improvements in a couple of months. I've long felt that map-based information was going to be a big thing going forwards. This might just prove my point for me.
