One new innovation is the Scratch Pad, a place to "hold" the locations of interest during a search and discover session.Search on an address, it appears on the Scratch Pad.Search on another, it appears there, too.Search for a hotel near one of the addresses and you can add one or more results to the Scratch Pad.The Scratch Pad itself can be e-mailed or blogged (at MSN Spaces, Microsoft's blogging environment, of course) for reference or to share with friends or family. The "Scratch Pad" holds locations of interest and can be used to e-mail or blog an itinerary. MapPoint maps, which are the core data, have a new look and feel.Panning now operates like Google maps: click and drag and the map moves in real time.Users can scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out or use a compass-like "game control" to navigate.As Law put it, "We tapped into things we know how to do here at Microsoft." Indeed. Law and the press materials released during the week made a big deal out of the "whole screen," "full bleed" nature of Virtual Earth.That simply means the map fills the whole screen and data and dialog boxes all appear "on top" of it.It's not a thumbnail map or a portlet in Virtual Earth, the user "lives in" the map. MSN Virtual Earth fills the entire window, "bleeding" to the edge.Note navigation and scale tools.(Click for larger image) The idea, explained Law, is to reveal the "real earth in a virtual way," a way that was online, searchable and discoverable.He likened it to another "channel" on MSN akin to Entertainment, Money and others.As one geography professor would put it, "Microsoft wants to offer a way to look at the world through geographic eye glasses (as opposed to Entertainment or Money ones.)"
Virtual Earth has been spinning in Internet time, according to Law.The project was literally suggested to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in a paper by members the MapPoint Business Unit.It was submitted, with many others, to Bill Gates for his annual "Think Week" reading.And, apparently, it came out a winner.The MapPoint Business Unit, with a new member, the TerraServer team, began work on the project in January. Microsoft previewed its new search platform, MSN Virtual Earth, at the D Conference ("All things digital") in Carlsbad, California, this week.Most commentators immediately linked the announcement to word from Google last week about an update to Keyhole called Google Earth.It's hard to make a comparison with Google Earth since it's still just a "virtual" virtual world.Virtual Earth is a "real" virtual world, in the sense that Mark Law of the MapPoint Business Unit showed us live code.(Release is expected this summer.) He noted during a demonstration earlier this week that should a programmer tweak something, we might see an error.(We didn't).
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