Windows Live Local

With Windows Live Local you can choose to view a map (as seen here), overhead imagery, or bird's eye views. The yellow box below the direction buttons indicates that bird's eye imagery is available.

While on the previous map page we clicked the aerial link and it generated this page, an aerial photo of the same scale.

Here we've clicked on the bird's eye link at low magnification. Note that there is a higher magnification image as well. Note also all the other bird's eye imagery available for the areas surrounding this one.

The scratch pad allows you to make and save notes about places you find. (In this case, as hard as it might be to believe we have the former location of Fort Washington, a Revolutionary War Continental Army defensive position surrounded today by apartment buildings in Manhattan).

While we were really impressed with Windows Live Local, it's not perfect. Things are a bit off between the map and bird's eye views here. Note where position four (a monument to Fort Washington) appears on this map; it's actually a bit southwest where we've placed the five marker.

Now that we have placed the marker for five on the map screen, we click over to the bird's eye view again and see that the positions are a bit off between the two.

We were unable to send our permalink map and scratch pad via our free Hotmail account, an error message instead resulted. On the other hand we met with success using---surprise surprise---our corporate Microsoft Outlook e-mail system.

The potential is there in Windows Live Local for it to become the local search tool many of us turn to and use on the spur of the moment to make and share plans with friends or for performing reconnaissance on places we intend to visit (in major cities anyway). With the ability to annotate maps with your own pushpins, create notes using the handy scratch pad and even email these to others, the service has the potential to be harnessed in ways no one has even thought of yet.