You tell me which you'd prefer if looking up Accra, Ghana - for example:

Yahoo's Beta version
or
Google Maps

Not including city locations in places like Africa makes Google Maps look bad.  Now that Yahoo Maps includes satellite imagery of the whole globe- I'm really liking it a lot.  Think Google Maps will win because of its API?  Check out for example what Chris Messina, Cal Henderson and Luke Dorny did with yahoo maps API (and Flickr's API too) in IamCalTrain.

Emily Chang (of eHub fame) and her design firm Ideacodes have done it again, taking what was a good idea for a service that used the Google Maps API and turning it into something more beautiful and functional than I could have imagined.  CommunityWalk is a service that lets a map creator place flags on a Google Map and attach text and images to each flag.  It's different from other services where the agency behind creating the map lies with either users, or a group, or there are different features. 

Check out the beautiful new design, tag cloud and search that's available at Explore Community Walk.  Very impressive.

The week's eTech conference has been the occasion for a wide variety of announcements, but many of the biggest players are moving in the same direction.  The value of opening at least parts of your software's code for collaboration with outside developers is now undeniable.  The only question now is who will offer the most compelling opportunities for collaboration, the best collaborative software ("mash-ups") and leverage this success through effective business models.

Over the last 48 hours alone:

• Yahoo announced a new library of APIs (application programming interfaces) that will let outsiders build 3rd party web sites and services that utilize Yahoo photos, shopping and calendars.
• Salesforce.com has announced a new developer community and tool kits to foster the creation of mashups with their popular CRM service.  For some time the company has said that 40% of their web traffic is directed at their APIs.  Now Salesforce.com GoogleMaps, Skype and who knows what else will make their service all the more holistic and compelling.
• AOL (this blog's owners) announced that they are offering an IM API to allow outside developers to create new plug-ins, integrate AOL IM into other online sites and services, etc.  (Some have said that the company's failure to open messaging across other clients is a major shortfall of this initiative.)
  

Some observers have guessed that this type of openness would be monetized by charging a fee for advanced use of APIs, but it appears that openness for the sake of leveraging a body of developers wider than the companies' employees to create features that will win over more users is the strategy being employed.

It only seems logical there would be a collaborative effort to add a folksonomy component to world mapping — enter Tagzania. Whereas 43places is more travel-oriented, focused on photos and user experience and stories of places, Tagzania makes use of the Google maps API to actually add tags to the maps themselves — so you can set a waypoint and tag it up. Each waypoint then becomes a "page" with an RSS feed, to track what other users add over time. All content submitted becomes open content under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

[Via Smartmobs]