MapsGeek.com has just launched, and describes itself as:

MapsGeek.com is a free website designed to allow anyone to easily build or access thematic maps and share them with the world.

Equipped with a powerful blend of features, MapsGeek will guide you in the map's making and let you publish this map on your website, blog to illustrate your articles. Moreover, by making this map public, other MapsGeek users will be able to update the data: your map is alive and never out of date !!!

The biggest draw appear to be the choropleth maps. Shaded area maps are a doddle for many offline applications (eg. Microsoft MapPoint) but are generally lacking from online applications such as Google Maps and Bing Maps, due to the need for large polygon definitions. MapsGeek.com is definitely not the first online choropleth map application, but it does appear to have deeper (ie. smaller and more detailed) polygon definitions. It is not clear how fine they go. For example, can it go as far as zipcodes, postcodes, and census tracts  like MapPoint can?

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written by MapsGeek, August 14, 2009

To answer your question: yes, we can. Actually it can go down to your bedroom since most of the polygons (which we call layers since they're not all polygons) are updated or drawn by the users themselves. Some are made public and fall in the common trunk but a lot stay private mainly because they have no vocation on being shared. We have the US Zip codes as a public layer, the whole world first administrative levels (based on GADM)... You can import ESRI shapefiles, MapInfo, KML to use them as your base layer.

Alex from MapsGeek

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Thanks for answering!
written by Richard Marsden, August 14, 2009

So there's the flexibility of letting users supply their own shapes, or using predefined shapes.

Letting users supply their own shapes is very flexible in its own right, but a very common problem is that the users often don't have the shape definitions. So it is good that you supply shapes to the zipcode level.

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