I'm pretty stoked that Microsoft is no longer evil/complacent and is innovating (again?). This is of course not the beginning of this turnaround, nor even the first time Microsoft-as-Good has reached me for unabstract personal benefit[1], but this is probably the first thing I've seen from Bing that could make the rounds being touted as cool without my first and overriding suspicion being "total astroturf".
Back in the days I read Slashdot, I very viscerally hated Microsoft like only a teenage Windows-user reading Slashdot could. I switched to Macs after the Intel changeover and I've been increasingly locked into Google since Gmail. Completely removed from their ecosystem, when (rarely) some news of Microsoft bubbled up to my attention, I watched with bemused indifference. Lately though, with Apple's behaviour especially, I've borne actively good will towards Microsoft. I'll probably never use Windows again, but I want them to succeed. Competition is good, and it's also very gratifying to see this affirmed.
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[1] "Windows 7-style Window Resizing" is my most indispensable feature in BetterTouchTool[1] - http://blog.boastr.net/
I had much the same train of thought when I saw this article. I've been very harsh on Microsoft since roughly the Active-X era of the late '90s for doing things that benefit their own dominance at the expense of the ecosystem. I WANT them to be good citizens and good competitors. When I see something Microsoft does that really is innovative, I'm happy. And at first glance, that's what I thought of this napkin-map thing. And then I tried to look at a Bing napkin map on this computer - running Ubuntu. They've done it with Silverlight. Back to disappointment.
This is really worth a look. My experience was very positive; it took only a few seconds to compute, and the decisions about what detail to suppress were made very insightfully. (This was for an address in San Francisco--streets were selected for all the approaches into the city, but very economically.) The result would be MUCH better to give someone than a standard Big or Google map. No bugs, no problems with silverlight. (From Bing Maps, I discovered, you find this feature by clicking on the "Map Apps" button at the bottom of the left column, and then choosing the app "Destination Maps".)
Why? Because I once walked into a pretty dangerous ghetto in Memphis thanks to having a map leave out information (even though it was relatively to scale).
OK, so the Google map is way busier and contains a lot of noise. But because of the Stax map we chose to walk from the National Civil Rights Museum to the Stax Museum because "the map shows it's only a few blocks over".
That few blocks turned out to be a 10 block walk that involved police (who turned back once we walked beyond a certain point), watching a gang trying to cut us off (they were armed), being rescued by a kindly lawyer who then drove us out of there and back to the police. Apparently walking through that neighbourhood is a death-wish.
The Stax map isn't of poor scale, it's just that it's aimed at drivers following main roads... a bit like the napkin map. The problem is, you cannot be sure of every use of a map and it's safer to leave more info in than risk decisions that will be made because of a lack of information.
As visually appealing and nigh-brilliant as that is, there's a fatal flaw in it that means I'll never touch the stuff:
It distorts the map to enhance meaningful areas. All those images are of the same area, compare them to the normal map on the left at the top of the article.
Brilliant and deadly. I use maps because they're physically accurate, so I can estimate times / distances between things, and find alternate paths if needed, and know if I went too far. The distortion there is way too significant to do that sort of analysis, though.
I know I may very well be in the minority in that, but there you have it. I'd love to see a large comparative study between "real" people. Gut-feeling is that most would like it, though, because it seems few outside the geek world are efficient at information filtering.
I think your objection is less about the type of person and more about the use case. Representative maps are best for showing relationships and directions. That's why public transportation maps (subways esp.) are drawn to show how various lines intersect vs. what lat/long coordinate you enter and exit. For your use case, a geographically accurate map may be better.
If you want objective accuracy, do you then use aerial photographs, rather than maps? The point of a map is exactly that it simplifies information, and exaggerating or downplaying certain features is a way of doing this.
Aerial photograph maps are barely more informative than line-maps, and they're filled with much more misinformation. Colors are not correct, I'm on ground-level so I don't see buildings from the top, trees, cars, construction, etc are all incorrect as well by usually over a year, buildings aren't skewed like that (especially tall ones)...
Besides, I'd only stated I use it for distances and paths, not color. Where the exaggerating / downplaying of features destroys the ability for comparative analysis of locations with other maps, I find I have little use.
But you're picking one aspect (distance) and attributing a lot of importance to it. Depending on who you are and what you want to do, that may not be the most important thing. For example, if you want to drive somewhere, the exact distance may not be overly important, but the intersections with larger roads probably is.
Semi-related, I want a feature for driving directions where I can specify that I'm familiar with either the origin or destination. If I print out directions, half the page is taken up with turn-by-turn instructions on how to get from my house to the nearest interstate highway. These should go away and be replaced with a simple "goal" instruction ("Get on I-71 North").
Bing already has a solution for that already, which they call one-click directions. If you search for a place, there's usually a set of options such as "from I-5 South," "from I-5 North," "from 450 West" which give directions starting from those respective highways. I'm a big fan.
Largely forgotten is an earlier offering in reduced-detail maps, MapBlast's drafting-diagram-like 'LineDrive' directions. It's still available if you get to MSN maps via mapblast.com:
Back in the days I read Slashdot, I very viscerally hated Microsoft like only a teenage Windows-user reading Slashdot could. I switched to Macs after the Intel changeover and I've been increasingly locked into Google since Gmail. Completely removed from their ecosystem, when (rarely) some news of Microsoft bubbled up to my attention, I watched with bemused indifference. Lately though, with Apple's behaviour especially, I've borne actively good will towards Microsoft. I'll probably never use Windows again, but I want them to succeed. Competition is good, and it's also very gratifying to see this affirmed.
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[1] "Windows 7-style Window Resizing" is my most indispensable feature in BetterTouchTool[1] - http://blog.boastr.net/