Google Maps and radar
The other day I was at
Google Maps looking up some directions (Expedia was not coming up at the site I was at - blocked by a proxy filter), and noticed that they now have satellite images available. You can do a turn-by-turn directions listing, pick one of the lines of the directions, and get a window to come up with that part of the map. There is a link for "Satellite", and that changes the picture from a graphic map view to an overhead view, with the line drawn on it. This is very very cool. There is one pair of related major problems I noticed from a user friendliness viewpoint; you can't zoom in very far, and you can't get the picture to rotate. These issues together make it harder than necessary sometimes to figure out what the satellite is really trying to tell you, even through it should be easier than the graphical map. (Compare this to
Microsoft Virtual Earth and it's 3-D changable views....)