Web 2.0 mobile for maps?

26 August 2008, 9:58am

Look at a dozen new ‘Web 2.0’ web sites and you get a dozen different impressions of what the term means. But one thing is sure, key Web 2.0 ingredients are user participation and (now) mobility. This extends into the mapping and directions functions on some major players sites as well, i.e. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Many industry experts use ‘Web 2.0’ to discuss the return and growth of Internet-based businesses. Others focus on the latest trends in graphic design, where Web 2.0 design elements include larger fonts (furl.net), bold colours (blogger.com) or pastels (twitter.com), reflections (apple.com), colourful icons (linkedin.com) and rounded edges and gradients (digg.com).

One important characteristic of a Web 2.0 site is user participation and another is looking ‘beyond the desktop’. Millions of people now browse the Web on mobile phones, BlackBerrys and TV sets, so Web 2.0 sites need to be able to ‘degrade gracefully’ onto smaller screens. Sites like flickr.com allow users to upload photos from their phones and Google offers a stripped-down interface at m.google.com. Another Google Web 2.0 exemplar, maps.google.com, proved that sites could perform complex tasks and still provide snappy response times. Microsoft's Outlook Web client is another example of a feature-rich Web application. Google Maps also ushered in the era of Web mash-ups - sites that use data from multiple providers to create new services. See googlemapsmania.blogspot.com for a directory of sites that integrate Google Maps with other data sources. Yahoo! (maps.yahoo.com) and Microsoft (maps.live.com) provide similar capabilities.

Google Mobile

Google Maps

Google Maps mashups

Yahoo Maps

Microsoft Live

Geo: International