There's been a bunch of MSN Virtual Earth hacking going on in my building over the past couple of weeks. There was my Seattle Movie Finder hack. Recently two folks on the MSN Messenger team created a shared map browsing application using the recently released MSN Messenger Activity API. Chandu Thota has the details in his post Virtual Earth and MSN Messenger : Peer-2-Peer Mapping Experience

If you are running MSN Messenger 6.0 or higher, open a conversation with your contact and click on "Activities" menu item; it will display a list of activities that you can use which includes "Virtual Earth Shared Map" as shown below:

Once you and your contact accept this activity you both can find, pan and zoom on the Virtual Earth map all interactively, like the one shown below:

Okay, I don't want to waste your time anymore - this is one of the coolest things I have seen in this space - try it out! you won't be disappointed! :)

PS: Kudos to Steve Gordon and Shree Madhavapeddi from MSN for creating such a wonderful app!

I got a demo of this from Steve and Shree last week, I didn't realize that it would show up in the MSN Messenger application so soon. That is some quick turn around time.

I also got a demo of a cool Start.com gadget which uses MSN Virtual Earth from Matt this week. I wonder how long that will take to sneak out onto the Web.

PS: In his post about this Robert Scoble states that the application was created by Scott Swanson. This isn't accurate, Scott wrote a similar application as a PDC demo but the version you can get in MSN Messenger activities menu isn't it.