Eye In the Sky

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Microsoft launched its Virtual Earth back in the summer as an answer to Google’s immensely cool . The MSN user interface was a little bit less simple to my eye, but the cool thing was that their aerial imagery of Downtown far surpassed the quality of Google’s.

Now Microsoft has rebranded their service as and added “Birds Eye view” imagery. It’s pretty cool. Here’s .

Some of the imagery appears to be pretty old, so don’t go trying to find the construction progress of your favorite South Park condo project. Here’s a . You have to figure Google has a lot of this same type of imagery, so this is one arms race I fully support.