Will you buy something because of Virtual Earth?

Responding to Microsoft’s new Virtual Earth beta in a SF Chronical article, Gary Price of SearchEngineWatch.com, says of the new service:

“…the focus on aerial imagery is more of a case of companies trying to impress users with gee-whiz technology than anything else…I don’t think that seeing an image from the air is going to make me go to a store and buy something.”

Instead Gary wants to see more data appear as you scroll through a map.

OK, sure more geo-tagged information would be nice, but otherwise I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

Yes, checking imagery can impact where or when I might buy something. I do this already. When planning out my TechEd trip a couple months back–where did I go to figure out which hotel I wanted to stay at? maps.Google.com–with the aerial imagery enabled. It made a big difference in my choice. Yes, it would have been nice if I could hover over a hotel to see how much a room is and maybe have shaded red regions where hotels were sold out over a given date range, but I wanted to feel good about where I was going to stay. I wanted to know if there was a restaurant near by–or was the hotel isoltated. Did the area look rundown? I’ve already done the same thing in arranging my trip to PDC 05.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I want more. Yeah, better resolution would be nice, but I also want real time projections of highway video overlayed on the maps. Yes, I want to see what the traffic is like in the same map. I even would like to see similar real-time video projections of mall parking lots or at toll-booths or other high-congestion areas.

The state of Arizona has a terrific real-time map with road-conditions. I’d love to see the road condition tags augmented with maps.google.com or similar services. We need real-time, RSS-like feeds that people can merge with the images.

How else might I use aerial imagery to determine which store I will go to? How easy is it to park? Do I have to go to a parking garage? How much might that be–that’d be nice to see graphically in a map. Is the entrance to a store best approached from the south or the north? Is there a mass transit terminal near by that I can take? I might pick one place over another that looks closer. These are the types of things I check already.

Do I check maps.google.com whenever I want to drive to buy something? Nope. But when I’m unsure of an area I’m finding myself doing it more and more. And now with my EVDO-equipped Tablet PC, I expect this trend to continue.

Virtual Earth is a beginning. Hopefully, it won’t just be a gee-wiz toy as Gary predicts, because I see a lot of great uses for it.

Overall I like the direction. It appears that both Google and MSN are competing to provide searchers with greater visual detail and more geo-tagged information. That’s great. My only suggestion is for them to tie in real-time feeds from other sources–current store hours, wait times at the DMV, projected video feeds, and on and on. There’s plenty of room for some very useful geo-oriented views of the world.