Anthony Caruana02 May 2008, 10:00 AM
Telstra's new Whereis site is packed with improvements over its often derided, clunky predecessor.
Telstra offshoot Sensis has released an all-new version of its mapping website
Whereis. We spoke to an insider on the development team to get the skinny on what's new.
The previous release "used to approximate an address along a road, now every house in australia has a precise point on the map" said the insider. We tested this out by entering addresses for a number of friends in different Australian cities and every one of them was found. As well as displaying locations on traditional maps, there's impressive satellite imagery that gives Google Maps a run for its money. Once a location is identified, you can draw a box while holding the shift key to zoom into a specific region.
Even entering addresses is much easier. When typing in a suburb, a drop-down appears with a list that predicts potential locales as you're typing. In fact, the revised interface that takes advantage of a number of Web 2.0 technologies and was developed with plenty of Javascript and AJAX.
One of the most popular features of Whereis is the ability to enter an origin and destination to get directions. This is dead easy now and the site's been enhanced so you can add up to five stopovers for your journey - handy if you're running some errands and want to work out the most efficient way to complete the sojourn.
We're also told that "the maps will also be integrated with other Sensis sites such as White Pages and Yellow Pages in the not too distant future". Some elements of that integration are already noticeable. For example, if you look up an address and wish to find all the cafes near that address, typing "cafe" into the search area will highlight all the cafes on the map. You can use the keyword search to find any business in the Yellow Directory and place them on the map. Many of the improvements seen in Whereis will make their way on to other Sensis properties such as the White and Yellow Pages directories.
Sharing and printing maps and directions is significantly enhanced. The email function works directly off the site although the ads sent to the recipient are quite large. If all you want is a link to a map you can easily generate one with the "Link" button.
The new Whereis supports Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla Firefox 2 and Safari 3. We tested it with Firefox 3.0b5 and everything seemed to work without incident. It's a significant improvement on the old release. Map quality is significantly better and the search functions work well.
Although the new Whereis site is significantly improved, Telstra may still have a hard battle ahead to win users back from Google Maps. Google is already working on
integrating "street view" with directions, so it can show ground-level images of streets with a guiding line running through them to show people where to go. This functionality is a way off for Australia, though, as Google is yet to add photos of Australian cities to Google Maps (though it is known to have been driving its photography vehicle around in Australia.)