I chose mapquest because it is one of a few useful
websites on the www. At mapquest, one can use an
interactive atlas to view the world. One can zoom
in down to a street level, all around the world.
The atlas is fully searchable- I was easily able
to find Cambridge by searching for "Massachusetts
Institute of Technology". The best thing about
this website is that it takes a very cool and
useful real world item, a map, and extends it. It
is a searchable map of the _entire_ world. The
creators took something cool and made it cooler.
They did not simply recycle an existing idea. They
exploited the nature of the medium, and made
somehting new and better. It is this spirit that
is lacking throghout most of the web. _I_ don't
want to read a magazine or book with my computer.
Lots of big companies seem to think I want to though.
Real books are much easier on the eyes and much
more portable. I want useful sites, like mapquest,
or intellicast that take advantage of the medium.
More on mapquest:
There is another cool feature at the mapquest that
tells you directions from address A to address B.
When I typed in my dorms address, and my high
school's it told me the exact route that I take
myself, only it got a little confused and told me
to take a left onto Mem Dr. from Mass Ave., which
is illegal. The essence was communicated though. I
really like the fact that, while they have
ActiveX, and java interfaces to their tools, they
also have image-map based interfaces too. This
allows any browser that supports clickable image-
maps to be compatible with their site. I do not
like to see sites that only support proprietary
interfaces like Macromind Director, ActiveX, or
even java (though java will probably eventually be
ok with me).
-Mike
In-Reply-To: Pine.SUN.3.95.970205180659.21427O-100000@blacksun.mit.edu