MapBlast

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

~ the eulogy ~

MapBlast covered the United States, and from january 2000 most of western Europe. It did not cover me. If you were online in Turkey on a modem in those years the mapping sites were something you inspected rather than used: you typed in an address in Boston because the help page suggested one, then watched a map of a city you would never visit assemble itself in a table cell. Your own street was not in the database and would not be for another decade.

Vicinity Corporation started in august 1995 in Sunnyvale and put its driving directions service on the web in october 1996. MapBlast was the consumer face of it. By 2000 it was the second largest mapping site on the web, permanently behind MapQuest, and it had done something MapQuest had not: it let other sites embed its maps. Yahoo and Excite both ran on it, and the same maps went out to Lycos and onto Palm handhelds, so one company's rendering engine sat underneath a large share of the addresses on the English-speaking web.

The money was never in the consumer site. Vicinity's real business was the store locator, the find-your-nearest-dealer page that a car company or a bank pasted into its own site, and by 2000 the archive of mapblast.com is full of the brand graphics for exactly those customers. The free map site was the demo. It was also a February 2000 IPO, underwritten at the last possible moment before the market closed the window on companies like this one.

Vicinity survived the crash by being useful to businesses, which meant it survived as an acquisition target rather than as a company. Microsoft agreed to buy it on 22 october 2002 and completed the deal on 12 december at about $96 million in cash, $3.33 a share, and folded the whole thing into the MapPoint Business Unit.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

The best feature MapBlast ever shipped came out of a university lab. Maneesh Agrawala and Chris Stolte at Stanford had been studying why people draw better route maps by hand than any computer produced, and the answer was that a person lies. A hand-drawn map stretches the confusing turns and shrinks the forty-mile stretch of highway into a stub, throwing away every road you were never going to take.

They built LineDrive to do that automatically, simplifying each road, then using simulated annealing to shove the segments around until a scoring function decided the result looked right. MapBlast put it in front of the public in 2001, so an ordinary person asking for directions got back something that looked like a sketch on an envelope and was easier to follow than the accurate version. Microsoft kept it running at MSN until around 2005 and then it went away. Nobody has shipped anything like it since, which is odd for an idea that demonstrably worked.

~ the day it died ~

The last archived copy of MapBlast as its own website is from august 2002. After that the front page starts bouncing visitors inward to a subdirectory, and by april 2003 every address on the domain answers with a permanent redirect to mappoint.msn.com.

That redirect took out more than the homepage. Because MapBlast maps were embedded in other people's pages as plain image requests, the shutdown reached into thousands of small sites at once. Brewery listings and real estate pages, a map of a street in Minnesota sitting in a table on somebody's homestead site. The Internet Archive is full of those broken requests, frozen mid-call to a server that had already been bought.

~ the long tail ~

mapblast.com is still a redirect today, twenty-four years after the site behind it stopped existing. The destination has been renamed more than once underneath it and ended up as Bing Maps, and Microsoft has spent the last two years retiring pieces of that too. The domain is the most durable thing Vicinity built, and all it does is point at whatever Microsoft is currently calling maps.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »