During the cleverly named Mapping the Future of Local Search session at last week’s Kelsey conference, conference attendees learned a key piece of jargon for conceptualizing how map providers think of annotating basic map presentation; overlays.
A bit of buzz was generated a few weeks back when Paul Rademacher mashed Google Maps was with Craigslist, creating a compelling way of visually navigating local real estate markets.
I was thinking about this when I read Gizmodo’s coverage of T-Mobile’s release of their “personal coverage check” solution, which allows you to see (claimed) signal strength at a user specified street address.
Until connectivity becomes truly ubiquitous, it would be very valuable (to me) to have a single mapping solution that could not only give you directions and local physical retailers/service providers (e.g., restaurants, banks, gas stations, etc), but also connectivity clouds (preferably with free vs. for fee presentations).
What other overlays would you like to see?