Nice 3D view of Safeco Field, Microsoft.

Today Microsoft released a 3D versions of New York City and other locations while Google released a new street side map view.

Beyond tourists, virtual travelers and developer creations (count on those in the coming days), this won’t be as useful until detailed maps are available in every major city. Would also like to see this not be so US-centric. What about other places in the world? Seems like Microsoft has more cities than Google pimped out but who knows how long that will remain. Whomever gets the most street-level 3D maps of the entire world and makes them available for mashups in other applications first is going to be at least the short term victor.

Google has extensive street side views in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and New York. Want to walk the Las Vegas strip tonight without getting tired feet or spending a penny, try this:

Google’s implementation is better than what Microsoft’s street side views back in February 2006 and the A9 street view from Amazon. None of this has done much to increase Microsoft’s search penetration over Google, so take the eye candy part of my title literally.

Microsoft’s version also requires downloading an add-on in Firefox (see below) whereas Google’s does not (correction: Google Maps does require newer version of Adobe Flash player).

In the Google street view demo video their street side guy or whatever he’s called has some resemblance to the Channel 9 guy, check it out:

Odd that they wouldn’t use a Google guy type character with different colors. Strange coincidence?

Phillip from Google Blogoscoped points out Google is also releasing something called mapplets, via the mapplets developer documentation:

“Mapplets are mini-webpages that are served inside an IFrame within the Google Maps site. You can put anything inside this mini-webpage that you can put into a normal webpage, including HTML, Javascript, and Flash. Google provides a Javascript API that gives the Mapplet access to services such as manipulating the map, fetching remote content, and storing user preferences.”

You can try out some mapplets in the mapplets directory.

Microsoft and Google have had a showdown at the map corral before. Virtual Earth vs. Google Maps was the first time.

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