MapCruncher turns static images into tiles suitable for use with Microsoft Virtual Earth (Windows Live Local), and presumably other tile-based mapping applications too. Very neat and useful, the existing hacks I’d seen to handle this on Google’s map API were relatively poor. Via VE blog.
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.