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Okay Google, you officially have competition. I've never considered MSN Virtual Earth much of a threat to Google Maps. After playing around with Yahoo's Mapping Beta I was impressed with the richness and functionality of their Flash implementation.
Google has definitely set the standard for mapping applications and everyone has given tremendous credit to AJAX. Rightfully so. But let me say that Flash has been capable of providing this type of functionality for a long time now and I'm glad to see Yahoo embrace the technology. It's long overdue and I would be suprised if Google didn't release a Flash version of their API. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft joins the Flash camp. I find that a little hard to believe since they're supposedly working on the Flash killer. I'm biased towards Flash but all I can say to that is whatever, I've been hearing this crazy talk for about 5 years now.
Back to Yahoo Maps Beta, it's neat and you can see elements of both Google (drag pan) and MSN (pixelated zoom), but they could do SO MUCH MORE to leverage Flash. I'm sure there was a rush to get this out the door. Now that "Web 2.0" companies can rollout releases amost daily it will be interesting to see what functionality crops up in the coming weeks. Somebody's got to leverage Flash video and push via XMLSocket!
The last (and biggest) point I'd like to make is there are API's to support Flash and Flex developers. Check out some of the examples and I'm sure you'll be impressed.
I downloaded the Flex API, which was nicely packed in an SWC file, and played around with it for a bit. Let me say that I'm highly impressed with the ease of development. I was able to bang out the map below in about 10 minutes. At any rate, I'm excited about the potential here and we're going to start seeing some amazing things crop up in the coming weeks.