The new MSN City Guides makes ample use of Live Search and Live Search Maps as well as video and social media. Users can share information through Windows Live and Facebook. Microsoft says this makes event organization easy.

"With Live Search and Live Search Maps integrated into the new experience, making a decision about what to do and where to go just got a lot easier," says a post from the Lives Search Team.

Local search results from Live Search are integrated throughout the site. This applies to all ZIP codes within the United States at this point.

"Filtering capabilities will help make it easier to decide where to go based on your chosen criteria," says Microsoft. "For example, type in ‘baseball’ as an event search and you can sort by relevance, date, type, or within a certain mile radius."

Businesses should pay special attention to MSN City Guides because users can find local business listings with easy links to Live Search Maps and one-click directions.

Microsoft has also taken the opportunity to map out the routes for St. Patrick’s Day parades and highlight items like Irish pubs in Live Search Maps.

Here is a parade route and some points of interest for Boston:

And New York:

And Chicago:

Microsoft also points to its MSN food channel – Delish, which is chock full of St. Patrick’s Day recipes today:

Search Engine Roundtable looks at Microsoft’s and many others’ St. Patrick’s Day designs in the search industry. Keep an eye on your inbox for the WebProNews newsletter today, which goes beyond the green links we have added to our site and includes an entire St. Patrick’s Day design theme, complete with a picture of me as a leprechaun. If that’s not enough of a draw, it’s also got some tips for getting more conversions out of your web site. By the way, if you’re not signed up for the newsletter, sign up!

Chris Pendleton posted on the Live Search Blog about the features, which include: 

- New imagery

– Weather integration

– Localized maps

– Near-matching capabilities

– Landmark-based routing

– Rich imagery for mobile users

– One-click directions

The new Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2 were both taken advantage of to bring about these new features, which Pendleton looks at more closely (with a bunch of screenshots) here. Application developers and webmasters can also use the new virtual earth offerings in a variety of ways.

Apart from the aforementioned features, "communities" are being stressed. "Community submitted collections are now indexed immediately after upload and can be searched seconds after they are created," says Pendleton. "In addition to this, we provide better overall information retrieval by using collections data to augment search results in the ‘business’ scope in cases where limited or no business listings exist that meet the search criteria." Microsoft’s local search has also been improved upon. Searches can now be refined further through filters, and related searches are presented.

Will any of this sway users away from Google Maps? Frankly, I have no plans on changing which service I use, but developers appear to be the ones who will have the most fun with Microsoft’s new features.

The "Highlighted Listings" program appears to have been in a sort of closed beta until now; on the Virtual Earth blog, evangelist Chris Pendleton refers to letting a secret out.  And even at this point, it looks like businesses will have to handle matters through email instead of an automated form.

As for what Highlighted Listings achieves, Pendleton writes, "[I]f you do a search for ‘Hotels In San Diego, CA’ on Live Search Maps you’ll get a result set consisting of hotels in the San Diego area; however, the difference is for every Choice Hotels (a subscriber to the Highlighted Listings program) location there’s a branded icon for the respective hotel (e.g. Comfort Inns, have the Comfort Inn logo, etc)."

Pendleton later continues, "Also as a part of the Highlighted Listings program, the links in the enhanced rollover are clickable and will redirect to a URL of your choosing for each location.  That means for each of your locations, you can have the link redirect the user to the exact physical location’s web page."

Depending on pricing, this may or may not be the sort of thing that companies will rush to embrace.  Yet it at least keeps Microsoft in sight of the Google-led pack, and an upgrade or two seems to be in the works.

 The new interface takes all the controls, for panning the map, switching between 2D and 3D, zooming in and out, switching between road, aerial, hybrid and bird’s eye views, and switching on traffic data, all in a simple, minimalist bar in the corner. You can, with a single click, contract that bar into nothingness:

Besides the improved interface, there’s a new version of Virtual Earth 3D for you to install. It adds these features:

• Add bird’s eye view to 3D maps.
• Put your own modeling creations on the map.
• Turn your collections into tours and movies to show and share.

LiveSide created this collection tour for everyone to enjoy. They also shared this video of the bird’s eye view imagery integrated into Virtual Earth 3D:

Here’s the new 3D interface, with a bird’s eye image taking up the center of the screen, and a ton of 3D buildings on either side:

LiveSide lists other improvements here and here, including the ability to abbreviate the beginning or end of driving directions. If you already know plenty about the end or the beginning (because one of them is your house or office), you can tell it to shorten that section and not waste your time telling you how to leave your own neighborhood.

Another new feature: traffic redirection. If there’s bad traffic, it’ll re-route you around it, though you’ll have the option to see the directions without that. Another one: One-click directions. Choose a destination, and it’ll give you a page with a map and seperate directions from the North, South, East and West.

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3-D looks at the Big Apple and street views of Miami were two of the big announcements at Where 2.0 in San Jose.

Microsoft and Google each attempted to out-splash the other with these impressive additions to their existing mapping products.

On the Google Maps side, the new feature called Street View provides 360-degree views of city streets.

They launched with imagery from San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver.

Google also announced the launch of Mapplets, which enable third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle.

Mapplets contain a trove of third-party information about cities, like housing listings and crime data, for use in mashups.

Google’s Thai Tran blogged more about them at the Google Lat Long Blog:

(E)ssentially, these are embeddable mashups. You can then choose which of these Mapplets you want to see overlaid on the same map and combine them with the built-in features of Google Maps, like driving directions and business search.

This lets you create your own mashups from the content that’s most relevant to you. It also gives publishers a new channel to reach the millions of Google Maps users who are looking for their content.

Microsoft debuted its 3-D cityscapes on Live Search Maps at the conference.

New York and several other cities in the US, Canada, and the UK received the expansive treatment.

The views Microsoft provided for New York show landmarks and notable locations in the city.

Business listings feature Yellow Pages information and other details about local businesses.

People will be able to create custom maps and lists of places on Live Search Maps to share with others.

Microsoft expects to have cityscapes available for a number of cities worldwide by the end of Summer 2007.

The 3-D images of New York City include aerial views of Times Square, Central Park, Wall Street and other well-known locations. The mapping service will also offer local listings, ratings, reviews and driving directions.

In addtition Live Search Maps will also offer real-time traffic information and custom maps that users can create and use for themselves or share with others.

Microsoft has plans to add more cities worldwide by the end of the summer.

Other cities that will receive the 3-D treatment include:

Austin, Texas

Cape Coral, Fla.

Cincinnati, Ohio

Indianapolis, Ind.

Northampton, England

Ottawa

Savannah, Ga.

Tampa, Fla.

This is a great boost for Microsoft to stay ahead and fresh in the race as their competitors still do not have this feature.

For now, available cities on Microsoft Live Search Maps are NYC; Austin, Cape Coral (Florida); Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Northampton (UK), Ottawa, Savannah and Tampa. One user writes, "The fact that they got this out before Google, considering how long Google has had the ability to do this is a real shot in the arm. Dare I say it, way to go Microsoft."

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