Strollerwalking Showdown: Which Maps Mashups Work Best?

I recently came across the interesting resource Bugaboo Daytrips, which offers parents traveling with tots suggested strollerwalking routes in major destination cities. The Flash-based, highly graphic site offers a stroller-friendly excursion in each of eighteen cities in Europe and the U.S. (plus one in Australia), and they are soliciting suggestions for more cities or walks to include.

But what if you want to find a walk in Baton Rouge or Montauk, not in Barcelona or Montreal? Better yet, what if you have a great stroller walking route of your own to share, and don't want to offer it up to the Web 1.0 gods and sit around twiddling your thumbs while you wait to see if they'll post it?

We decided to check in with the major players in online personalized mapping to see how they measured up in terms of logging excursions parents take on foot with strollers and kids. We evaluated Google's MyMaps feature, Parentography, Platial's Mapkits system, and the influential maps mashup Wayfaring.

While we couldn't resist pointing out total scores, the individual scores and feature descriptions may be the most helpful; depending on your priorities, any of these could do a serviceable job of mapping your stroller routes, and each have unique features that may be important to you. Also, keep in mind that our assessments are based primarily on the sites' ability to help users document and share kid- and stroller-friendly walks.

Parentography: We've blogged about Parentography before, and are active members of the user community. [Disclosure: Parentography founder Tim Ludwig contributes a monthly feature to Z Recommends.] The mapping system works well despite occasional bugs and the interface is clean and friendly, but what keeps us coming back to the site is its storytelling vibe and its comprehensive, community-based rating system. Members give a star rating, category, seasonal appropriateness, and age range to each place they add to the database, and can also rate the helpfulness of others' reviews. This, plus the site's explicit emphasis on materials relevant to parents with kids in tow, makes the Parentography community, though still small, a highly communicative one.

In addition to reviewing individual places, users can create "excursions," maps with multiple waypoints designed to offer a series of sequential suggestions along with a suggested excursion time. The greatest strength of the feature is its encouragement of blogging-like behavior, inviting creators to tell the story of their excursion and upload photos; no other platform offers this level of personalization and storytelling. The big downside for creating walking excursions is its reliance on automated connection of the dots if you ask for directions, which assumes you are driving between waypoints in a car and thus suggests poor strollerwalking routes (major arterials, roads only, and oblivious to walkers' needs like sidewalks, shade, and sensible walking shortcuts) that cannot be overriden by user input. Waypoints are numbered, however, and listings are ordered according to the excursion creator's suggested itinerary. [Sample excursion]

Platial MapKit: Platial is a great mapping resource with an eye towards open formats. Key features include allowing/disallowing map data export by other map creators, tiered contributory access by other users (keep it closed, moderate, or open it up with no restrictions) and the ability to import places from an RSS feed or spreadsheet. The map's database of places is robust, the interface is fairly intuitive, and a variety of sharing, embedding, and export options are available.

Route-labeling is not an option, however, and unlike Google Maps, you can't drag and drop markers anywhere, but are required to use the address lookup to set waypoints. The best you can do is to point map users along a particular route is to number your locations, but even those will show up only in your descriptions, not the place titles. but you can edit numbers into place-names if you like. You can also click places into being in addition to using the address lookup. (Thanks, Tracy!) Our sample map is a walking tour of San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, strolling up Columbus Avenue with stops at Molinari Delicatessen, Washington Square Park, and the tourist gem of the North Beach Library's extensive playground, ending up at the San Francisco Art Institute (Jenni's alma mater), an unlikely but perfect destination for families looking for an interesting place to wander and great views of the city. You can add places yourself if you like; this, plus the export options which allow Platial maps to be embedded in other blogs and websites, are what gave Platial's "Community" score a significant boost despite limited opportunities for off-map interaction. [ZRecs' North Beach Map]

Google MyMaps: Google's relatively recent MyMaps service is a lesson in open APIs: Big companies foster mashup culture because it phones in free developer time that the big boss can later use to crush those contributors it doesn't see fit to buy out. MyMaps allows anyone to create customized maps, and, in typical Google fashion, offers a robust feature set in a deceptively bland interface. Points can be added via address or placename lookup, photos and even YouTube videos can be embedded into waypoint descriptions, and, critically, routes can be hand-drawn using simple drawing tools.

Google offers little in the way of community features to share and discover maps through networks, but user-generated maps are a part of Google's widely-used Google Maps search and in Google Earth, and it's only a matter of time before they are integrated into the basic Google engine's search results. MyMaps does not currently allow for "crowdsourced" (community-driven) mapping within a single named map, and it offers no incentive structure - profiles with "points" for items logged, for example, as Wayfaring and Parentography do - to encourage contributions. We created a three-point map in Central Park with a walking route, mostly for demonstration purposes - we encourage you to do better and send us a link! [ZRecs Central Park Map]

Wayfaring: Wayfaring's take on collaboration blends elements of other services by making its "waypoints" items which can not only be easily accessed and added to anyone's maps, but ones with shared place profiles that can be edited by any Wayfaring member, with photo and video upload and description-editing capabilities. The net result of this is a significantly enhanced surfing experience - a couple of clicks on one map and you're off to another one - and a clear sense, as a mapmaker, that you have a solid dataset to use as starter content. But it also means that there is a limit to how much you can control the information your map's visitors see, effectively short-circuiting attempts to make a fully customized, "personal" map. The user interface is also simple but not intuitive, and, astonishingly, the site has no published "Help" section or user forum for the numerous error messages we received when trying to contribute.

Wayfaring does not offer a customized or automated method for describing routes between locations, walking or otherwise, but does allow for the numbered labeling of waypoints on a map. Although it has many attractive features, the clumsy user interface, lack of user support, and extreme form of shared information make this platform the poorest performer when it comes to sharing walking excursions. [Wayfaring]

Love a mapping service we didn't cover here, or think we missed a crucial stroller-friendly feature in one described above? Tell us in the comments.