Suva, Fiji Mapped on OpenStreetMap.org

Watching live twits for the keyword "Suva" in the twitter mashup I'm creating, I came across this twit from strangepants:

Slowly mapping Suva on OpenStreetMap.org: http://tinyurl.com/5bszrn.

Checking it out I find the beginning of an up to date and accurate street map for Suva, Fiji.

Even living in Fiji you can't find good maps of Suva. The ones sold here are outdated with inaccurate street names and locations. Google Maps does not have coverage of Suva and Google earth has very limited coverage.

This is another example of how openly edited initiatives (eg: OpenStreetMap.org) are superior to closed proprietary initiatives (eg: Google Maps, Yahoo Maps).

Google Maps Geocoding API Launched, Finally!

Looks like Google finally releases a (edit: an improved) Geocoding service for the Google Maps API. Try it out here. I wonder how compares to the Yahoo Maps API Geocoding service that has been available for some time.

edit. Google Maps API has had geocoding available since June 11th, 2006 according to their blog article "Geocoding at Last". They've since then added geocoding for the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

It would be interesting to see a street/address based geocoding service from OpenStreetMap.org. From data alone it is obvious that it would have more world coverage then Google Maps or Yahoo Maps Geocoding. At the moment they only offer geocoding based on "geographical object names" with help from Geonames.org. It should be quite trivial to write a street/address geocoding algorithm using the OpenStreetMap.org data. Half the world lives outside the data covered by Google and Yahoo! Geocoding - the exotic half.