So we have Google giving away a free app with mashup potential, and MS giving away a toolkit to build your own apps. Both approaches seem to fit their company goals: to organize the world’s information (and make money from contextual ads) vs. to sell software (namely Windows). It’ll be interesting to see which model wins out.

What I notice, is:

1. Wider set of geo-spatial queires (range, path, etc)
2. Integration with OpenGIS WSDL and GSS RSS feeds
3. Interconnetivity with ARCSDE, ESRI products for overlay

Now take a look at this video that shows how they use their plugin architecture to achive animated content as a mashup:

Ghosts in Virtual Earth:

http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=1a6474da-1d84-479c-a95f-59e8234d745e

details on implementation:

http://heptazane.spaces.live.com/

(funny, they are using Flash video for web streaming (well let’s say it is humerous given my familiarity with Microsofts various attempts at video streaming, net conferencing, etc, and my friendship with Ray (Actually Israel) Ozzie (yes, he original came for the Aretz, a very long time ago, before we were undergrads at U of Ill).

The SDK looks fairly rich, but I’d like to see more features in the main app that are tunable/selectable/extensible via script. In other words, MS seems to take the approach that Explorer and now VE functionality could be embedded in any custom app. I think it’s more powerful in terms of leveraging code, tools, and UI, to see any app integrated with any browser, which is what we’re seeing with a lot of AJAX versions of popular apps.

What is your take on the fairly large SDK that Microsoft is providing (routing, other spatial queries) compared to what Google has done?

http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/

Also, read their blog about SLAM (Social networking maps).

http://www.msslam.com/about.aspx