Yahoo! Maps, Driving Directions, and Traffic: Yahoo! has released a new version of their mapping service. It’s done in Flash, which is nice. A bit smoother than the DHTML version over at Google, but no satellite images.
If you want directions and you enter a destination address, it pops up a list of businesses at that address. I don’t know why this would help (“Take the elevator to the fourth floor…”?), but it’s interesting.
And you can have more than one destination, so I guess you could plan out a multi-stop trip.
The directions are very cool too -- click the down arrow next to each instruction and you get a little thumbnail of exactly what it's telling you to do.
I like the multi-address functionality. It was always pretty tedious when you had a multi-stop trip but could only do a start and finish location. This way you can actually have a little finer control over long distance trips or if you want to see the difference between two different paths.
The API is fantastic. Just using the JavaScript API, I was able to add a map of my city with waypoints for each commercial property listed with links to the individual pages for those properties.
I've been hearing for a long time that Yahoo!'s APIs are way above Googles. This may be another example -- it's clear, well-documented, and easy to use.
