Trulia Hindsight
Trulia Hindsight is a pretty neat method of visually building trends.
What I wonder about is why they used Microsoft’s Virtual Earth for Hindsight and yet use Google Maps for their main search site. Anyone know?
We’ve certainly debated the merits of each but our conclusions are likely biased since we’ve only done a really deep dive on Virtual Earth. It would be great to hear how they feel after implementing sites with both.
June 12th, 2007 at 8:19 am
I believe Trulia didn’t develop the feature, a company called Stamen did.
June 12th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Mainly we used Virtual Earth imagery because we used our own mapping library, Modest Maps (www.modestmaps.com), and needed to get permission from an imagery provider. MS were OK with it, so we went with Virtual Earth.
We also liked the fact that the MS hybrid images are a single download, and that the neighbourhood names are displayed for cities that have them. So actually VE turned out to be a good fit for the project too.
I think the Google Maps API is the most solid and best supported of the javascript APIs though, so if you’re not using your own mapping library it’s still a solid choice. Look at implementing your core functionality in something like Mapstraction (www.mapstraction.com) if you want to stay flexible and might want to switch APIs in the future.