Microsoft's Bing Maps updated

Microsoft have updated and optimised Bing Maps with a set of new features and an improved look and feel.

Chris Pendleton, Bing Maps Technical Evangelist, confirmed the changes in a company blog post yesterday. "If you visited Bing Maps today you may have noticed a new look and feel. Well, that's because it has a new look and feel" noted Pendleton.

The full list of changes are listed below:

Draggable Routes - Generate a router and drag the route to change directions
Zoom Bar - Jump to specific zoom levels within predefined settings
Command Parsing - Intelligent searching, for example want traffic info? Enter "Seattle Traffic" in the Bing Maps search box.
Embed a Map - You can now embed Bing Maps on your website
Dynamic Compute - Bing Maps is now running in data centers in 7 locations around the world meaning you will locate the closest server to you
New Navigation - Button bar contains improved navigation features
World Wrap - Bing maps no longer stops at the international date line
Optimised Bing Maps - The default Bing Maps home page dropped from 678kb to 484kb

Microsoft

also announced a November Bing Maps imagery update for Europe. 178,720 square kilometers of Europe has been updated with more recent imagery. At the end of Pendleton's blog post he hints "what could possibly be next?", we're still expecting a Silverlight version of Bing Maps similar to the Bing Maps World Tour, perhaps that's next. The Bing Maps update is the latest in a series of updates that Microsoft is rolling out to Bing this week, including Bing Video.

Thanks to nifke for the news tip