There was a long and spirited discussion at Scobleizer this week about Live Maps Collections started when Scoble asked "Why Doesn't Microsoft Maps Get the hype?" Does our name suck? Is our URL hard to remember? Is Live Maps difficult to use? Robert thinks its mostly the later. I partially agree. Amongst the usual trolling and flame bait, a bunch of good comments ensued as readers weighed in with their opinions. As a PM for Live Maps, its sort of my job to sift out the good feedback and act on it, being careful to detect the potential 'false positives' and get them usability tested. Robert not understanding that his Collections were in a dropdown list could fall into this category. He clearly stumbled at this point in our user interface, but how many other users stumble in the same place? how many complete the task? A quick look at our analytics reports over the trailing 30 days shows that 1.5 million times users successfully loaded a Collection they had previously saved. A knee jerk reaction to Robert's feedback might be to make an immediate change in the UI. But the data tells me to work with our usability team to find the best solution that helps people like Robert but doesn't break the experience for the users that seem to be just fine with it.

What follows is some commentary responding to the Scobelizer thread and the blog posts that spawned the thread in the first Place. I'll finish up with a custom tutorial for Robert since he asked for one in comments :-)

Virtual Windows Live Local Search Maps Earth notches another one
In Dare's 25 Hours a Day blog, he writes:

It looks like there is a new version of Live Maps according to the team blog. This product has now officially gone through more names than I've had ex-girlfriends. It's been named MSN Virtual Earth, Windows Live Local, Windows Live Maps, Live Search Maps and now Live Maps. It's sad that we are intent on screwing one of the coolest products we are shipping these days in this way. :(

Now that we've passed Dare, we have our sights set on Wilt the stilt Chamberlain. 6 down 19,994 to go. But seriously folks, I don't know what to say about this. In our 2 years of existence we've been through a lot of URL and name changes, but somehow 20 million UU (and trending up) found their way to Live Search Maps last month. That's still a loooong way from our number one competitor, MapQuest, who many industry estimates put at over 3 times that figure. I have to wonder if we had left our name alone (we were originally VirtualEarth.com) what effect that would have had on our usage. I work on the product side of Virtual Earth, so I don't have a lot of insight into the decisions that have lead to this series of name changes. For those that really care, i'll see if i can get someone in our product management group to share some insight. But here's a hint. Do what I do. When someone asks me about the product I work on, I just tell them 'Virtual Earth'. done. they enter VirtualEarth.com in their web browser. It's our original name and the URL will always work, long after we've passed Chamberlain. Its easy to remember and the URL is the same as the name.

The Best Google My Maps feature didn't get blogged about this week
Why is the best feature in Google's My Maps not mentioned by Scoble or any other blog I've read this week that talks about My Maps? Because they're all tire kickers! As with just about any feature, its the little things that matter most. fit and finish. the subtle convenience feature that allows a real user (not someone passing by for 10 minutes to write a blog post about it) to get their task done better. Tire kickers will never notice this, but I bet any serious user of My Maps will appreciate the ghost nodes during object editing. totally slick. If I ever meet the engineer that came up with that, I owe them a beer for a job well done. It's subtle, and to the tire kicker goes totally unnoticed. But to a hardcore user that has to do a lot of complex object editing, its brilliant. We've added a bunch of features to Collections this year that will also be missed by the drive-by reviewer, but that our frequent Collectors really appreciate.

Example. Its a common task to build 'Favorites' Lists with Collections. Favorite Bars, Used Book Stores, restaurants, etc... to share with friends. Most users doing this want to present their Collection in order from best to worst. Or chronological order. When you add an item to a Collection it gets added at the end of the list by default, but you can hover over it and grab its drag bar to move it around in the list featuring variable speed autoscroll. The comment trolls at Scobelizer will never notice this feature, but that's OK because they don't actually need it, so I wouldn't expect them to find it. The guy who's rearranging his itinerary for his trip to Miami next week thinks its pretty hot though.

Subscribing to another users Collection in your RSS reader (more on that below) is another one I'd put in the category of only being useful for real users. Private Collections would be another - until you need it, who cares?

How to Open a Collection at Live Search Maps
Opening a Collection he had previously saved is a task that bit Scoble. He said it made him feel like an idiot, which is just not acceptable. Even though a bunch of others have no trouble here, the UI definitely needs a tweak in this area if Scoble was stuck after trying it 8 times. This is definitely going in for a usability exam, but in the meanwhile here is a quick look at how to Open a Collection. Micah (@63 and @89) already showed off how to do this with a video; here it is with a few screenshots and some bonus steps for the motivated.     

1. Sign in. Live Maps will let you create simple (only 10 items) Collections without signing in, but to really create and share, and to get the benefit of data roaming sign in.

2. Open the Collections panel. The Collections --> Open menu item will open the Collections Panel. It's in the Collections Panel that you edit and manage your Collections.

3. Select the Collection you want to Edit. Any previously saved Collections you have created will appear in the drop down list in the editor. You can move between them easily by simply selecting one. Changes you make like adding new items or editing/deleting/moving existing items are automatically saved for you.

4. Share with Friends. The Share menu lets you pluck a permalink to the Collection to send to a friend, like this-

http://maps.live.com/?cid=546E7E30AC2C5011!470

The properties of the Collection allows you to enter tags and set privacy for your Collection.

5. Viewing and Subscribing to Collections. When someone clicks the permalink to your Collection, it loads in Live Search Maps on the Collection Viewer where it is read only. You can't edit someone else's Collection, but you can add items from others Collections to your own. Just hover over an item and choose 'Add To Collection' and it is copied. When you see a Collection you like you can add it to your Favorites or Subscribe to updates in your RSS reader. When you subscribe to my Live Music Venue Collection, whenever I add new clubs they show up in your reader as if they were a blog post. Under the hood (view source of the feed page) the feed is RSS2.0 annotated with GeoRSS markup [like this <georss:point>47.614384 -122.346264</georss:point> ]. Also not of much general interest (Live Maps is the only major mapping web service exporting GeoRSS), but it's one of those features that when you need it, you can't do without it.