Note - I updated this post to reflect the proper name for the website - Live Search Maps. I had been incorrectly referring to the website as Live Maps in my blog posts. Sorry about any confusion I may have caused.

This afternoon a new release of Live Search Maps was launched, the sixth major rev since July 7, 2005 when V1 went out. Among the new feature items are a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements and enhancements to existing functionality. For some of the big items, like GeoRSS publishing of Collections, I’ll have separate blog posts this week to drill in on details. In the meanwhile, here is a list of all of the new and improved features to get you started.

Firefox support for 3D mapping
If you’re running Firefox 1.5 or later or Windows, the VE3D control is now supported. It is a Netscape style plugin developed using NPAPI and hosts the VE3D managed control. In Live Search Maps, click the 3D button on the navigation dashboard to launch the setup to either install or update 3D functionality. The setup process itself has been streamlined for both IE and Firefox users – It’s a lot smarter about dependency checks and component installation. Regardless of which browser you use, you only need to run the setup once and you’ll be able to go into 3D view in either browser. Memory management and cache performance has been improved in this release of 3D, providing a better overall experience for exploration.

The Space Navigator from 3D Connexion is also supported now in 3D view. Space Navigator is an innovative input device optimized for moving around in 3d virtual spaces. As always, Virtual Earth also supports any game controller that works with DirectX, such as the USB XBOX controller you probably have sitting around the house :-)

Ratings and Reviews of Business Listings and Details page enhancements
You can now read reviews of businesses entered by other users, as well as adding your own ratings and reviews for any business in Live Maps. To get started do a search for businesses in the Yellow Pages like this search for Book stores, restaurants and Supermarkets. Click on one of the listings to bring up its details page, like the one shown below for Bailey-Coy Books. There you can see the average user rating for the business and page through reviews previously entered by others. We've partnered with sites like Judy's Book to feed thousands of quality reviews into the system already. Of course you can contribute your own Rating and Review right there on the details page with the 'Write Review' button. Had a good experience with a physical therapist? Tell your neighbors about it. Tired of the overhyped bar in Belltown that's too crowded, serves watered down drinks and takes a 10 dollar cover weeknights even though every other place on the block is free? Call em out on it..  

The Ratings and Reviews features are currently only available in the US market. Also on the Details page for a business, you will see suggested 'Find Nearby' follow up queries based on the business you are looking at. These suggested Yellow page queries show a preview of how many results for each category are available in your search area. 

Subscribe to a Collection via RSS.

RSS is a family of standard formats used to publish frequently updated content, such as blogs or news feeds. You can now subscribe to an RSS feed for a Collection so that you can be kept up to date as the author of the Collection adds new items. When you subscribe to a Collection’s feed, your RSS reader automatically receives updates as the author makes changes. For instance, if someone sends you a link to a Collection of their favorite Italian restaurants in your city, you may want to subscribe to the Collection’s feed to be kept up to date as the author adds more restaurants. There are many good RSS readers available – some run in a web browser while others are applications that run on your PC. Live.com has very good RSS viewing built right in. In this screenshot to the right, you are looking at someone’s collection of  favorite restaurants in Seattle. If this is of interest to you, you can subscribe by clicking the Subscribe link or RSS icon and adding the feed to your favorite RSS reader. For the example Collection shown here, here is the normal permalink to view it in a web browser, and here is its RSS feed to add it to your favorite news reader.

Live Search Maps is now a GeoRSS publishing tool as well! Collection feeds are  GeoRSS compatible, meaning that they have special markup to encode the geographic information about each item in your collection into the feed. RSS readers that don’t understand this added information will gracefully ignore it, while Geo-enhanced feed consumers can us this information to present the feed on a map. This element of the feature is of great interest to application developers who use RSS as a means to pipe data from one application to another. Collection data can now be easily accessed programmatically and consumed by any application that can parse and consume RSS/XML. Yahoo's Pipes, The Virtual Earth Map Control, and as of recently Google Maps are all good consumers of GeoRSS. The addition of the Geo information opens up a wide range of possibilities for developers. For application developers interested in learning more about GeoRSS, I suggest starting at GeoRSS.org. Mikel Maron, a key contributor to the shaping of the GeoRSS standard, maintains the Brainoff blog and is another good source of developer info. I'll follow up this week with a much more detailed post about GeoRSS and how to take advantage of this great new feature in Live Search Maps.

Area Calculations and Drawing Enhancements

Ever wonder what the area of your property is? Or how large your town is? Now you can see the area of a shape you draw on the map in square feet, acres, square kilometers, etc… And as in previous releases, for lines you can see their length. To try it out, just use the drawing tools on the scratchpad. You can add a bunch of lines and shapes to a Collection, and when you share it with a friend they can see the area and distance measurements in the Collection Viewer.

While you are drawing your lines and shapes, if you reach the edge of the map it will smoothly scroll for you to make it easy to keep drawing without reaching for the keyboard. The cursor keys will pan the map during drawing as well, but most users find it more convenient to have the map scrolled automatically .

Drag n’ drop re-ordering of items on the Scratchpad.

You can now hover over an item on the scratchpad and a mini toolbar will appear on the item. Grab the drag handle in the toolbar and drag the item to a new position in the list. If you need to move the item far in the list, it will auto-scroll for you when you reach the edge. This is a big convenience if you are managing a large collection and need to move a new item from its default location at the end of the collection up to the top of the list. If for instance you are maintaining a Collection of your top 50 favorite live music venues and want to move a new entry from its default position at the end of the list up to the top, this is now a snap.

Traffic and Driving Directions Enhancements
When you create a route in Live Search Maps, traffic flow and incident information will automatically display if your route is in a city where we have traffic information. There is a link in the Directions window to toggle the traffic overlay off when it is no longer needed. This saves you from having to know if a city has traffic or not, and is a great reminder to check real-time traffic at the time you are planning your route. The Itinerary display has also undergone a face lift to improve readability of the instructions.

Address-Only Geocoding
This is a useful feature if you are looking up a lot of addresses in the same city, or your map view is already around the city you are searching. In the past you always had to enter a full street address with city, state or postcode information like this - 1200 madison ave, new york, NY.  Now, if your map view is already in NY, you can just enter the street address as 1200 Madison Ave, and Live Search Maps will default to finding it in NY.  

Live Search Maps for Outlook is Updated
This is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that brings maps, travel planning meeting enhancements and a bunch more location based features to Outlook. This release adds support for Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista. It also brings the 3D mapping experirence into Outlook - slick! You can Install it now from http://outlook.maps.live.com

Note for Developers
We will be releasing V5 of the Virtual Earth Map Control shortly. Expect to see news here on this blog in 2 weeks or so introducing a host of new features in V5 of the Map Control and API, including updated documentation and samples in the SDK.

We hope you enjoy using this new release. Stay tuned here over the next few days for more in depth information on these features. As always, your feedback is most welcome - the team here is always listening and acting on your requests and bug reports.