The Chinese have created their own map service.

And again, the Chinese distinguished themselves - the country's leadership decided that the Celestial Empire needed its own map service, for some reason Google Earth was not suitable for the Chinese, and this service was recently announced. He received a simple name Map World. It was created, unlike most cartographic services, not by private companies, but by the State Bureau of Geodesy and Cartography of China. As a brainchild of Google, Map World allows you to see the world in 2D and 3D, of course, in this case much more attention was paid to the mapping of China, and then of other countries.

Service developers are hoping that Map World will become a world-famous service, which automatically translates it into the category of powerful competitors for Google Earth. Powerful because the Chinese prefer to work with domestic products, and this means dozens, if not hundreds of millions of users since the launch of the project.
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Now the service is already working, albeit in test mode, so anyone can try Map World at work. The disadvantage, and explicit, of this service is that the data will be updated only twice a year. As you know, Google Earth updates the data every minute, if not more often. There are still drawbacks, but it is better to find them yourself by testing the service. By the way, all the service inscriptions are in Chinese, I did not find anything in other languages, this is a significant drawback, agree :-)

It is worth noting that the Chinese government not only launched the service into operation, but immediately began to attract domestic companies to use Map World. In addition, there is in this country and the law, according to which all organizations that work with cartography, electronic or paper, should receive in the state. bodies of the appropriate license. Interestingly, Google is not included in the list of companies applying for licenses.

The Chinese promise to block the use of all map services that have not received a license to work in China. Thus, Map World will immediately have even more users - literally hundreds of millions, because China has the largest number of Internet users.

In principle, the service is quite good, so it can be used as an alternative to Google. True, there are similar services for Yandex and some other companies, so the domestic user is unlikely to switch to a Chinese product. Although, how to know.

Via afp