Multimap.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

multimap was a UK-coded product. i used mapquest by default whenever an english-language site sent me to a US map, and ttnet had a homepage that pointed at yahoo maps for a while in the mid '00s. the times i ended up on multimap, it was because an english forum link from donanimhaber's international travel subforum pointed there. for some reason the postcode-style URL stuck in my head longer than the actual interface.

sean phelan and ed parsons founded multimap in london in '96. it was the first european consumer mapping service of any real scale. the product was a simple "type a postcode, get a street map, click anywhere to recenter". by '03 it was serving close to seven million monthly users and had ordnance survey data, the bus and tube layers london city brain ran on, and an enterprise API used by yellow pages and AA route planner. for a couple of years it was the british mapquest, with better data than mapquest had in europe.

microsoft acquired multimap for $50 million on december 12 '07. the press release said the european mapping data would slot under live search maps. honestly that was the end of multimap as a brand. the team got folded into the bing maps org. by '10 the multimap.com site was running on the same bing tiles as everything else, with the multimap header still on top out of habit. on march 31 2015 microsoft pulled the redirect and multimap.com went straight to bing.com/maps.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

multimap was the first european-side consumer answer to mapquest. the data set was different from the start, ordnance survey instead of tiger line, which meant UK postcodes resolved cleanly and US street addresses were a hack. the british bus and tube layers were the real moat. by '06 it had a london travel mode that knew the night-bus replacement routes by name, which google maps did not learn until later.

~ what really happened ~

the acquisition press release pretended this was a partnership. for a year or so it kind of was. microsoft kept the multimap homepage running with its old multimap design and just swapped the tile server over to live search. then live search rebranded to bing in '09. the multimap header got smaller. the bing header got bigger. by '11 the only thing left was a redirect. on march 31 '15 the redirect itself was deleted and multimap.com went straight to bing.com/maps with no acknowledgement. one of the british tech blogs noticed the next week.

~ what got buried ~

the ordnance survey data that made multimap distinct stayed in bing maps for years afterward. UK postcode searches in bing.com/maps were still using the multimap pipeline as late as '17. the multimap api keys, which a couple of UK government sites had embedded in long-forgotten code, kept returning data on bing for almost a decade after the brand officially died. sean phelan was a regular on the london startup circuit through the late '10s, telling the same story about pre-google mapping at every conference.

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