Saturday night's meetup at 5 seasons was great. I got to meet Scoble, drink great beer, meet and talk about technology with a host of my tech counterparts here in Atlanta. Scoble was chatting about Virtual Earth and was he ever right. It's pretty damn cool. The satellite photo and resolution (up to 40 yards!) is much better than Google's, and theirs lots of nice design features. The light transparency of the top bar (IE only). The double click to zoom and center. A nice set of tools (permalink, locate me, blog it) and the large % percentage of page devoted to the actual map. The virtual earth team hit it on the head with their Aerial Photo with Labels option. This is what Google should have done. I guess the folks at Virtual Earth where reading Tufte's post on mapped photos.
Things I didn't care for in Virtual Earth? I don't like that it opens a new window for directions. And I'm not crazy about the compass rose; it should give more feedback when you click on it. And it would be nice to be able to move both the compass rose and the zoom bar to the blue bar or anywhere you'd like.
Topics at the meetup ranged for sever farm setup with Linux to Smart phones to of course, Windows Vista. Rob Cannon and I had a great discussion about Avalon and all of the interesting stuff in .NET2.0 and his new gig. Michael Earls talked about some very cool stuff that he's doing with Windows Media Center and other crunchy bits on .NET 2.0. I also got to meet Jim Wooley, who is a VB guy working in the mortgage industry. Jim's also a moderator of the local VB group.
One other interesting thing is that 5 seasons picked the night that Scoble came to dinner to start a blog. Ken Grisnak is leading their effort to extend the experience of the brewery to the net. Check it out if you're local or visiting Atlanta.
The only thing I would change about the meetup is to set up the area / tables so that there is more mingling. See everyone at the next one!
Update: On the Virtual Earth resolution 1 pixel = 40 yards. Things I'd like to see: Access to label info (think right click on the Staples Center in LA and set as the "Starting point" and then right clicking on the Hilton Checkers and set it as "Ending point" and then get a path between the two. Another cool think would be to have different options for those paths. Think walking directions in the city and driving directions in the burb's. Another nice feature would be if multiple views are available of a sat view, make it an option. Why? If you look at downtown Manhattan the shadows cast by the buildings obscure the view.