“Free travel blogs are the perfect way for you to seamlessly capture all of your memories from your journeys and share your adventures with friends and family,” says MapQuest’s Anke Corbin. “It’s easy to set-up and add photos, stories and more, making it possible for everyone to create their very own travel blog!”

The offering, of course, includes features to let you share your stuff on social networks or with automatic email updates. The iOS app features offline access.

Additionally, you can read journals from other people, which might be just as helpful while you’re traveling as keeping your own. There are privacy settings that allow you to share with only who you want to.

“Travel Blogs is not just a tool to help users document their recent day trip up the coast or two week cross-country excursion,” says AOL’s Brian McMahon. “As part of our library of over 24,000 blogs from Everlater, now part of the MapQuest family, our goal is to help give people valuable and authentic stories that inspire them to set out on their own adventure.”

No word on a possible Android launch.

MapQuest announced that its new Gas Prices app is now available on both Google Play and the App Store. The best part is that the app is completely free so users can check up on local gas prices without having to pay a dime. Here’s what users can expect to get out of the app:

As expected, MapQuest ties the new app into their own dedicated maps service. It’s strange that they created an entirely new app just for the gas prices when they could have just integrated the feature into their maps app.

So does MapQuest have a chance of competing with already existing gas price apps? Gas Buddy is obviously the most popular app, but it relies on user reports. Without those reports, the gas prices may not be updated as frequently. MapQuest is promising frequent updates without the input from others. Beyond that, there’s not much difference between the two.

It’s really up to whatever maps app you currently use. Gas Buddy uses Google Maps whereas MapQuest Gas Prices obviously uses MapQuest. It does seem strange that Google hasn’t made their own Gas Prices apps or integrated it into the current release of Google Maps. Maybe a Google Now update can add the feature.

It’s too late to go back though, and iPhone users will have to somehow deal with distorted satellite images, poor location search, and misplaced buildings. Apple is on a hiring spree, hiring even former Google Maps engineers to work on their new software. Google, meanwhile, hopes to get a stand-alone app store version of Google Maps out before Christmas, though progress is slow. One other fallback option for iPhone users that may not be immediately considered is AOL’s MapQuest app for iOS.

MapQuest today announced an update to their iPhone app that includes a few new features. Perhaps it senses that its app is about to get a lot more use and it wants to impress, or perhaps this is just part of its regular update cycle. Either, way, MapQuest now features “drop a pin” and favorites. “Drop a pin” will allow users to mark any location on the map and receive directions to it, without having to know the name of the location. The favorites feature allows users to bookmark places the travel to often (or are planning on traveling to) for easier access.

“As the world’s leading supplier of in-car location and navigation products and services, TomTom provides coverage for more than 7.5 million miles of roads across North America,” MapQuest’s Jennifer Asbury said in a blog post. “That’s like going to the moon and back about 16 times. That’s like traveling the length of the Great Wall of China over 1,300 times. That’s like running well over a quarter of a million marathons. Basically, it’s a lot of mapped miles any way you look at it.”

“With MapQuest and TomTom maps, you could drive virtually anywhere there’s a road in the United States with our app as your travel companion (No need to panic if you forget to print off directions before leaving your house.),” added Asbury.

Earlier this month, in an effort to lure developers from Google Maps, MapQuest launched free and unlimited APIs.

Google, meanwhile, continues to enhance its Street View imagery. Today, the company announced some new State Park and other California imagery.

By signing up for MapQuest’s free Community Edition license, developers will have unrestricted access to all of MapQuest’s APIs. The change to MapQuest’s licensing terms seems strategically planned since much news has been made recently about Google Maps changing their rates so as to charge smaller businesses for using its API. Google recently backpedaled on the decision and announced that it was dramatically reducing the usage fees for its APIs, but the exodus of developers and businesses had already begun.

MapQuest has also relaxed the terms dictating what developers can build with its API. Developers are now able to build paid mobile apps and can use SSL. MapQuest has also raised the limits on service calls and now offers 5,000 each of geocodes, routes, and search calls per day, which is actually twice what Google allows – well, for free, anyways.

Here’s a chart MapQuest put together detailing the new free usage limits of the API.

As mentioned, Google Maps drastically reduced the cost of its new usage fees but it remains to be seen whether developers and businesses will continue to have a sour taste in their mouth and opt for other mapping services. OpenStreetMap and deCarta have already enjoyed an influx of new developers from Google Maps, so it’s possible MapQuest could replicate that success as well. The only possibly snag to MapQuest’s announcement is why it didn’t make this decision sooner, like earlier this year or at least sometime that would have been sooner after Google Maps said it would begin charging more fees.

At any rate, it’s still good news for anybody looking for a reliable and less costly alternative to Google Maps.

[Via MapQuest Blog.]

Search Engine Land cites a new study by Implied Intelligence that compared 19 different local search services, including Bing Local, Google Maps, several services under the Yellow Pages umbrella, Foursquare, Yelp, and Mapquest. Implied Intelligence looked at criteria such as record coverage, phone errors, address errors, duplicate listings, and more with each service in 1,000 local businesses in the United States. Of all the services included in the study, Bing tied for the top spot with both Superpages and Yellowbook, both of which belong to the Yellow Pages collection of directories. Google Maps wasn’t far behind at fourth and Yellowpages rounded out the top five (SEL has bar graphs along with the full scores of the rest of the search engines if you’re interested).

Implied Intelligence completed a similar study prior to this most recent one in which Bing actually ranked fourth behind Google Maps; Superpages and Yellowpages were ranked first and second, respectively. Comparing the two studies, Implied Intelligence deemed Bing the most improved local search service (at least among those included in the first study).

Since Bing and Yelp just announced their new local search partnership all of five days ago, I’m presuming that the data in Implied Intelligence’s study does not include any of the “Powered by Yelp” results that are beginning to show up for local businesses. However, Yelp placed at the #8 spot on the most recent study and #6 in the first study. I’m deducing that the quality of Yelp’s local search didn’t diminish in the time between the two studies so much as two new services, Yahoo and Whitepages, were added to the second study and simply outscored Yelp, thus pushing it down a couple of spots.

Of course, no single local search service is going to be the one directory to rule them all because if that were the case, this kind of comparison would be unnecessary. Still, in the shadow of this report, the question for Bing is whether including Yelp in its local search will actually devalue the search engine’s local results or if Bing will be able to maintain a top score among local search services. I would think that Bing’s search algorithms would be smart enough so as to not have the partnership actually result in an inferior quality but rather include from Yelp what Bing might initially have been missing. At least, that’s what my hope is.

We’ve asked Implied Intelligence to confirm whether or not the Bing Local Powered by Yelp data was included in this study, but have yet to receive a reply.

At any rate, that Bing was able to best Google in accuracy of local search results echoes what Bing’s VP of Program Management Derrick Connell recently said when comparing the two search engines. Speaking at a Q&A at SMX Advanced 2012 earlier this month, Connell made the claim that Bing was at least as good as Google in some aspects and possible better in others.

This results coming out of Implied Intelligence’s study would confirm Connell’s claims.

Update: According to Implied Intelligence, the tests on local search quality were conducted around May 15th, 2012, meaning the Yelp data wouldn’t have been included in Bing Local results.

The most notable improvement to the app, at least in my nowhere-near-comprehensive first impression, is the directions feature. In virtually every map service, whether its Google Maps, Bing Maps, MapQuest, or whatever, the directions always contain way too much information for certain junctions in your trip. Really, nobody needs to know the state route number and the multiple names of a street – one will suffice. It’s less to juggle around in the head while you’re trying to, y’know, drive an car safely. The new MapQuest app for iPhone remedies that vexing amount of information by giving you one name for your turns/exits and also presents it in a large, easily readable font.

Below is a before-and-after comparison of MapQuest 3.0 and the previous version, both of which display the same step in the same directions. In the new version, which is on the right, it is clearly apparent what street I should be on the lookout for during this trek without muddling my already-divided attention with superfluous transit details.

Another improvement in Mapquest 3.0 is the layout of the menus. As you can see in comparison above, or maybe you just know from using the app yourself, the main menu (where you type in your search or directions) has been consolidated from a full space-consuming menu bar at the bottom of the screen to a single “Menu” button in the lower left-hand corner. Now that the menu has been liberated from the bottom of the screen, you’ll find a few more options in the Menu with 3.0, like live traffic conditions and options to easily clear the map or edit your location/directions.

Where the menu had previously been you will now find a collapsable menu of options to conduct quick searches for places like gas stations, hotels, rest stops, drug stores, theatres, banks and, yes, even ice cream vendors. You can view more than one of these categories at once, so if you really want to find a hotel that is within walking distance to bar, you can choose both of those options to satisfy your every need.

The menu bar at the bottom is also collapsable now so you can see a great area of the map. Oh yeah, and if you didn’t notice in that last example, there’s now a landscape view for MapQuest, too.

Other fun inclusions in this update easy searches for gas prices at nearby stations and an overall better, faster search function when trying to figure out just where the hell you wanna be going.

Apparently getting directions out of one’s own neighborhood is enough for people to vocalize their complaints to mapping services, but MapQuest is the first to actually heed those critiques and announced today that will allow users to get directions that simply skip ahead to a nearby major road that you’re familiar with.

There is one catch to this nice feature: in order to enter your address and bypass the tedious directions out of your stomping grounds, you have to sign in to MapQuest using your Facebook account info. Depending on how you feel about sharing that info, and presumably linking together your Facebook information with your exact home address, carry on as you see fit. However, MapQuest assures you that it won’t post anything to your wall without your specific direction.

If you’re undeterred by sharing such information in close proximity to your Facebook profile, you can also enter the type of vehicle you have and MapQuest will generate an estimated fuel cost for your trip. MapQuest will provide you with multiple routes so you can decide if taking the scenic route this time is really worth the financial commitment.

So here’s hoping you know what you’re doing when you pull out of the driveway.

There’s been some competition regarding online maps of late – Wikipedia, FourSquare and Apple all stopped using Google Maps and switched over to OpenStreetMap, primarily due to the fees Google had been charging. Mapquest, which has 239 patents registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, has been a backer of OpenStreetMap, supplying tilesets, APIs and other tools. Surely some of the Mapquest patents were acquired in the Microsoft/AOL deal. Conveniently, AOL bought Mapquest in 1999 for $1.1 billion, and could claim one of its aforementioned tax losses on that deal.

In early March, Mapquest stated on its developer blog, “Is 2012 the year of Open mapping? We’ve been ecstatic to see the energy around OpenStreetMap, and have noticed several applications recently convert to using MapQuest-OSM tiles and other companies like foursquare embrace OpenStreetMap as a foundation of their business.”

It would seem that Google Maps will be going up against an OpenStreetMap/Mapquest/Microsoft trio in the near future.

People has started using MapQuest to pin the places they have visited, where they are going, and how they are getting there. Road trips can now be given more detail and more insight as people share what they’ve done scrapbook style.

The method is easy. Just create the map you want on MapQuest. You can choose a single destination, or directions, show the locality in great detail, or relative to the entire country. Once you have what you want, press the Pinterest button in the top right corner of the MapQuest page, and boom, a map image and link is created for you to upload on your pin board.

This new technology is great for documenting vacations and business trips, letting people know you’re traveling in style.