Puzzlepieces – tag ‘aol’

MapQuest Dev Blog – MapQuest Opens Up – in the UK - people’s eyes tend to gloss over when I explain that it won’t be that many years before most online maps and GPS devices use OpenStreetMap as their data source. And although use of OSM has been spreading, this is a very big deal… MapQuest is not only using OSM data on a demo site, but hiring people who have built parts of the open source map stack to improve their work and release it openly, AND contributing $1 million to the open mapping cause in the US. Good job AOL.

Via Marc Canter, I learn that AOL is creating YAPP (yet another personal portal), in the DHTML/AJAX style. That’s by no means a bad thing, though.

So now we have all the major players with a personalizable home page: Yahoo!, Google, MSN (Windows Live), and AOL (okay, so theirs is alpha). 3/4 of those are ‘all cool and ajax-y,’ Yahoo! being the odd one out. Yahoo!’s is the oldest, and I’d be quite surprised if they weren’t planning a new version with a richer interface.

In the ajax-y arena, there are several which are just as good or better than the major players: Netvibes, Protopage, eskobo, and several others.

Looking at another facet, 3 of those major players, and none of the others that I’m aware of, allow third-party modules. I haven’t looked at Microsoft’s, but I did look at Google’s last month in Why is the Google Homepage API not HTML?. Surprise, surprise, AOL’s announcement today is that their API is a microformat (HTML).

Aside from the AJAX, does this remind anyone else of 1999? I’d accuse some of copying from others, but… well that’s life.

Update January 20: Yahoo!’s is now all ajaxy, although it doesn’t seem quite as well done as some of the others. No third-party modules yet, though.