SubscribeCity8 Launches New Beta: Annotation On Street View
Shanghai based City8, the digital map with street view launched a new beta this morning. Besides a cleaner interface, a bunch of new features has been added:
- The most important new feature is that users can add annotation directly on street view picture. There’re two types of annotation: general and personal. The personal information can be as private as a dating venue. Maybe City8 should implement filter for users to turn off personal information in the future, as they are probably irrelevant.
- City yellow page guide. They have collected all the important places in the city on one page. This is useful for first time visitor of the city.
- MSN bot search interface.
- Two new cities were added into City8 family: Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
- New Flash and HTML sharing code to embed street view map.
- API. This thing needs a little clarification. It’s actually a standard pattern of URL. For any known place in Shanghai, you can use the standard URL http://sh.city8.com/keywords to visit it. You can use scripting code to add link to street view map to any place name on your website automatically.
Overall, the new beta version adds a couple of long awaited features and it’s faster than before.
How do you compare City8 with Google Maps? I am still with Google Maps. Why? Because sometimes I want relevant web pages about the place I am searching. And I don’t really care about the street view. Most of the time, I just want to know the exact location. Later I will see the place with my own eyes and probably bring back bunch of pictures taken by myself.
There’re two kinds of users City8 is targeting: visitors and local residents. For local residents, I would suggest a smart feed for all the updates relevant for a specific users. If you use Facebook, you know what this smart feed means. Maybe I will be interested in latest annotations added around the place I am living.
The reason for this is that by the end City8 will not just be a map, it should be an information center. This is related with City8’s business model. More about this later. Now you may just want to check out the new beta version.
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Interesting to see how fast they copied the google street view feature. By the way a good english streetmap for Shanghai is this one. http://www.smartshanghai.com/maps/smsh_map.php
Actually Marc, City8 has been using live mapping and panoramic software on their site since launching their alpha version in 2006 (http://china.bvcapital.com/?p=56). This may just be a case of great Chinese innovation that lacks the funds of Google-types or VCs to properly build out the business.
[...] The service enables users to contribute real pictures of certain places. It’s similar to City8’s annotation service. But it’s more like a complement to its street view feature. EEmap is another good customized map hosting service based on Google Maps. But it’s feature can be replaced by Google’s My Maps. [...]