It’s unfashionable to say it, but I rather like Microsoft’s Live Search Maps. The first thing you notice is the maps themselves are clearer – more map like – than at rival Google Maps, but it’s the bird’s eye view that strikes me as most impressive. You can find a location, then view it at an angle – not from right overhead, as with Google Maps’ satellite view – which gives more perspective. Then you can spin right around a point, through 360 degrees in four stages.

Because the images from each angle are obviously taken at different times as the satellites pass overhead, you get some rather interesting effects. Take the Guardian’s new home at King’s Place, London. In Google Maps, it’s a hole in the ground.

In Live Search Maps, take the overhead view and the image comes from even earlier than Google’s – the site is still home to a working warehouse (making it, perhaps, two or three years’ old). Move into bird’s eye view, and you can spin round a building site and see four different stages of construction. The opening shot shows the core is being built into the large hole in the ground (late 2006, I think). In the final shot the building looks finished, so must be from this spring (the building is, today, externally complete, and being fitted out for occupation later in the year).

Click on the pictures above today (the day of writing) and you should get to the original picture on Live Search Maps. But, in time, those links will come to show a more recent image.

Which begs the question… I’d love to know if Microsoft (and Google) are keeping these images as they replace them with new versions… over time, they’d build up a archive of cities as they once looked. You could view timelapse overhead shots of districts as they change – in the case of King’s Cross, that could be quite a change indeed. It would add a fascinating new layer to the mapping services, even if you’d still really, really want to change the splendidly inelegant name of the Microsoft version…

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