Announcing Static Maps. No, seriously…

November 30th, 2007

You will have done well to miss the evolution of online mapping to use AJAX technology in recent years. Draggable (or slippy) maps have become the norm for users, and websites and the user experience are all the richer for it.

A strange time, then, to release new – wait for it – non-draggable maps? Maps that don’t move no matter hard you drag them? Maps that need pan and zoom buttons to move? So, why have we just released new API functionality that does just that?

Well, because mapping is used by more than 25% of the world’s internet population, and the figure rises to well over 40% in the US, UK and France. Out of 200 million online mapping users, a significant minority can’t run AJAX services for one reason or another: old browsers, JavaScript disabled or security constraints around firewalls. We would estimate that anywhere between 2 and 10% of users fall into this category.

Another sizeable group is still running on low bandwidth connections where JavaScript objects and map tiles may download too slowly to satisfy the demands of users for their instant gratification.

Turning the table for a second, there’s another group for whom a lightweight, non-AJAX solution makes sense. Not all developers feel comfortable with developing in JavaScript, while simple embeddable snippets of code may not give them all the functionality they need.

We believe neither in the lowest common denominator solution for all, nor that only the most capable developers and users should have all the fun. In that spirit, we’ve just launched our brand, spanking new static maps interface. It rounds out a set of APIs – a direct web services API, JavaScript API and static maps API - for our platform that use common conventions to deliver the same coverage, functionality and quality of service, regardless of the users you target or the developer community you belong to. We’ve even joined them up for you so that the JavaScript API detects browser capability and can ‘fall back’ to static maps when required.

Static maps are now part of the Multimap API and our Open API.

As ever, we welcome your feedback

Posted by Matthew Quinlan Filed in Multimap Open API

2 Responses to “Announcing Static Maps. No, seriously…”

  1. Blog What I Made » Simple Static Maps API, similar to Google Charts Says:
    December 11th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

    [...] maps API which I think is actually pretty similar to the Google Charts API in some ways. The new static maps API is an incredibly simple way to insert a map onto your pages without having to write any actual [...]

  2. Chris M Says:
    December 13th, 2007 at 3:39 pm

    Congratulations on the Microsoft Buyout.

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