Map24

» see map24.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

map24 was german-centric at the licensing layer. by then i was in ankara on ttnet, and the two web maps i actually used were yahoo maps and, later, google maps once its turkey coverage got usable. map24 sat in a corridor of german and central-european usage where it had five million people in one country and 150 million monthly page views across the whole service. i knew it existed. i did not open it much.

mapsolute gmbh launched the site in 2001 as a browser-based address search and route planner. the differentiator was maptp, an in-house tile-serving and routing engine that could render an interactive 3d route flyover in the browser at a time when the main web maps were still flat png tiles. that was actually novel for a while, google maps did not ship draggable ajax tiles until february 2005 and did not have 3d anything on the web until much later.

the coverage was wider than the user base suggested. really though, map24 mapped europe, north america, south america, asia and oceania. usage was concentrated in germany but the maps themselves were global. the model was ad-supported and free. a url with a search box and a route planner, no login and no download.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the tech ~

maptp was the thing that made map24 different. instead of static tile images the engine streamed a client-side vector representation, so the same window could be zoomed and rotated without a page reload. the 3d mode extruded buildings and terrain into a low-poly rendering that ran inside a java applet. really though, that applet dependency became a problem after 2008 when browsers started tightening java plugin controls. it aged fast.

the routing logic was solid though. mapsolute had licensed the underlying road network from navteq for years, that data feed was the same one powering in-car navigation systems in bmw and mercedes dashboards at the time. really though, the same routing engine ran mapsolute's mobile java app for older feature phones. a decade before smartphone maps became standard.

~ the takeover ~

navteq bought mapsolute in january 2007. the deal absorbed the mapping tech but map24 the consumer site stayed live as its own brand for another four years. navteq was itself acquired by nokia later in 2007 for eight-point-one billion dollars, part of nokia's push to own the in-car navigation and mobile-maps stack.

map24 sat inside that acquisition without much strategic attention. nokia already had its own consumer web map at maps.nokia.com and did not need two brands for the same product. the consolidation into a single brand called here began in 2011, was announced by nokia in november of that year, but map24 had already been quietly shut down two months earlier.

~ the shutdown ~

15 september 2011 was the day the site went dark. the notice was small, no press release beyond a redirect and a short goodbye on the front page. www.map24.com began pointing to a nokia maps landing and later to here.com once that brand launched. the java applet and the 3d flyover went with the domain redirect. the maptp tile server followed a few weeks later.

what got buried was more than a brand. maptp was a genuinely early piece of interactive web-map tech that predated the ajax era of google maps by several years. really though, its dependency on java applets rather than javascript put a ceiling on how long it could stay usable. the modern here maps runs on webgl and completely different underlying tech. the archived version of the map24 frontend is still browseable through wayback but the maps themselves no longer load, the tile server has been off for over a decade.

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