GeoComrade

If you follow the mapping space, chances are high you’ve heard about Google Maps Mania – a popular blog featuring mapping applications developed using Google Maps API. As it turns out there is a similar resource for Russian mash-ups. Developed and maintained by Abava, Google Maps Mania.RU lists a ton of excellent Google Maps implementations like this one, this one and this one. Be sure to check them out.

Screenshot above from oldmos.ru, a resource for geo-tagged historical photos of Moscow.

Just over a month ago Russian search engine giant Yandex started crowd sourcing (People’s Map – Народная Карта) their map data, and things seem to be going well. In the first 24 hours after the public release users have added close to twenty thousand city boundaries, seventeen thousand buildings and thirty five thousand km of roads and much more. The growth didn’t stop there. In today’s blog post Yandex says that they now have several cities that are mapped with detail down to the building level.

Interesting enough, the news from Yandex comes at the same time as the announcement from Google to hire 300 people to correct the mistakes of their crowd-sourced map. According to Peter Batty, the correction project will cost Google about $8.5MM in labor costs alone. With scale Yandex will likely run into a similar issue with data quality, so it will be interesting to see how they address them.

In the mean time, Yandex outlined the development road map for the immediate future which includes things like arrows for street traffic flow, ability to zoom beyond the resolution limit of aerial photos, management dashboard for user’s objects and more.