Chris Pendleton at Microsoft, has announced that the Virtual Earth ASP .NET Control is being dropped. This was officially in CTP (Community Technology Preview) status, and as a part of the Live Frameworks CTP which is also being retired.

The explanation is that this was really only a wrapper. The AJAX JavaScript and Silverlight controls should be used instead.

There are also two alternatives. Chris Pietschmann at Simplovation sells a Bing Maps ASP .Net Control (Web.Maps.VE v2.0). A free trial is also available for download.

Secondly, John O'Brien at Soul Solutions wrote the original VE ASP .NET control for Microsoft. John plans to open source the code, and publish it at CodePlex.

I've met both Chris and John in person - they're great guys and Bing Maps experts!

Chris Pendleton's announcement can be found here.

Today, Twitter announced a native geo-location API. The API will be in the form of opt-in data fields, allowing an application (and the user) to set the geo-location information on a tweet-by-tweet basis. For example, a user might set a mobile device to include the location (derived from the device's built-in GPS receiver) for tweets about specific events or locations - eg. tweets related to a natural disaster, public event, or even a "meet me outside the art gallery". Privacy is ensured as the service is opt-in, and requires the application to explicitly attach the location data fields.

There have been a number of third party attempts to include geo-location information in tweets. These have been flawed for a variety of reasons. Coordinates could be difficult to enter/interpret with few if any automated standards. Coordinates could also take up valuable tweet characters. Encoding schemes helped to reduce character counts, but these also made the coordinates even less intelligible. The end result is that very few tweets currently include geo-location data. This is likely to change as the new data fields are adopted by Twitter applications, and new Twitter map-view applications are created.

Twitter's blog announcement post can be read here.

The Interoperability Group at Microsoft have released a "Virtual Earth Integration Kit" for PHP. This works with the Virtual Earth Web Service (aka "Bing Maps Web Service" - the Microsoft branding marketeers haven't found the Interoperability Group yet!). Here is the description:

Summary

The demo integrates Microsoft's Virtual Earth Web Service and API to embed a map into a PHP application. Web site users can add their location to the map and the map displays a pin for every user location stored in the database.