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I admit this is partly a rehash of this January story, but The Map Room offers nice simple graphs on the online mapping services and GPS devices marketshares. In short, MapQuest and Garmin (in the U.S.) are way ahead their competition. From TMR: "MapQuest continued to lead with more than 50 percent of the market, with Google Maps second at 22 percent, and Yahoo and Microsoft trailing. [...] survey conducted in February of the U.S. market gave Garmin a 56 percent share of the consumer GPS market [...]" MapQuest also recently added current traffic conditions to their mapping services, something Google Maps has since over a year. See also related stories below.

Baliz [in French] made me aware MapQuest introduced My MapQuest: "Get your very own place on MapQuest to store all your favorite maps, access your recently mapped locations, and edit your own settings that make MapQuest a more personal experience. The best part is that once you sign up, you take this with you on any computer and, soon, on your mobile device. [...] In this release we're putting together the foundation of a personalized MapQuest experience but you can be sure that we will be adding great new features to make your journey more seamless in the coming months. Here at MapQuest we're focusing on creating features that make your life on the road easier." Interested in MapQuest? Take a look at recent MapQuest stories below.

Earlier this month The Map Room published an entry named MapQuest: ‘Out of Hibernation’ or Muddling Through? From a SEL interview with MapQuest VPs: "During the last six months, MapQuest has come out of hibernation and is now firing on more cylinders and delivering more products. There were two things going on prior to that time period that explain our low profile. There was considerable effort working on our new back-end technology. It is based on completely new platform technologies that was consuming a fair bit [of] our effort. There was also a bit of miscalculation in that we didn’t do much that was visible to the user. In hindsight we should have been more visible but we knew we needed to get our house in order to do what we wanted to do. This is exemplified by the deliveries in the last four months. Every two weeks for the last four months we have delivered new functionality and features." And just last Friday, APB mentioned two newly added widgets for MapQuest: local tweets and CareerBuilder jobs. See also previous related stories below.

GeoWeb Guru offers a technical overview of MapQuest. From the overview: "MapQuest have fought back and have produced a public API which is available in free/developer and enterprise versions. The API's strongest point is probably the wide range of supported languages (JavaScript, Adobe Flex, Flash, ActionScript, C++, Java, and .NET). All are documented. Documentation and samples are generally good, although it would be useful if the HTML documentation was available online, as well as in ZIP archives. [...] MapQuest also features a native Traffic Control. This displays traffic status reports as an overlay and can be customized in a number of ways. This is a feature that is currently only available on Google Maps and Virtual Earth from third parties." Don't miss the previous related stories below.

Three blogs mentions the latest marketshare battle events in the online web mapping services arena. From the article: "Notice that in late December, it looked like Google Maps was ready to overtake MapQuest. Last week, MapQuest had regained an 11% lead over Google Maps, up from 1.6% in the week to 3rd January 2009. In October, MapQuest rolled out some new features. At the time, it looked as though MapQuest had already lost the momentum to hold the #1 spot but now that those features have been available for a few months, perhaps they are helping MapQuest regain a foothold. The ascent of Google Maps is a result of the shortcut in the search results on Google. 61% of visits to Google Maps came directly from Google last week. Yahoo! Search was the site's #2 referrer of traffic and accounted for only 1.07% of US visits." The numbers: Google Maps at 35.67% and MapQuest at 39.49%. See the numerous related previous stories below.