Collaborative Mapping that works (2): An overview of Web Mapping apps
As a follow-up to the previous post, I felt the need for an overview of Collaborative Mapping applications, how they differ from MapMyGlobe, and why MapMyGlobe is better 
A first category is made of apps whose goal is to collaboratively make map tiles, as opposed to annotating existing ones. This category contains some really cool projects, the most prominent being OpenStreetMap. These projects are very promising and sooner or later their data will be more accurate than traditional (non-User-Generated), commercial map tiles, and their API will be a huge competitor to Google and Live Maps. However as I said, we at MapMyGlobe are focusing on annotating current map tiles.
A second category of apps regroups projects that are technically very close of what MapMyGlobe does, but that can just not be called collaborative apps: in those apps, an individual creates a private map by annotating a provider’s map tiles, and either sends it to his friends, or makes it public, but viewers don’t have the ability to edit it. In this category are initiatives such as Wayfaring, and of course Google’s My Maps.
The third category is a subtle variant of the second one, where mappers don’t really add their own content to the maps, but rather link to other data sources. Contrary to the second category, most of these apps can be called collaborative, because everybody can usually add data from the data sources. Examples of such mashups include Panoramio, a Spanish app that enables pinning pictures on a map, and that was recently bought by Google, or GeoNames, which allows users to pin Wikipedia articles on the map.
The fourth category differs from the third by the fact that the app has its own content, i.e. it’s not a mashup anymore. MapMyGlobe is in this last category. Everybody can edit the content that’s really the app’s content, not content from a third party. The project that would be most closely related to that, especially on the technical side, would be WikiMapia. However MapMyGlobe differs from WikiMapia by two things: first, while WikiMapia is an attempt at a very generalistic description of the world - which is essentially, placenaming -, MapMyGlobe has a precise purpose: being an virtual travel guide. Second, WikiMapia’s places’ descriptions are static in the sense that some textual content is attached to a particular location. However, MapMyGlobe aims at providing a more interactive way to visit places, thanks to user-defined animations and graphics.
In conclusion, I believe there’s more and more space in today’s internet for collaborative mapping apps, and I hope MapMyGlobe will be a part of this collaborative revolution