Today, O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference kicked off. Where 2.0 is a conference about the mapping and location technology movement, and discusses some of the projects related to these technologies. Companies like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft as well as smaller (but not less interesting) services and companies like Meetro are at the event to talk about some of their latest efforts.

So, that being said, today we saw the release of two mapping APIs by Google and Yahoo!, each of them with a different usage perspective. I usually don’t take sides in this kind of thing, but Google sure is kicking some ass. Not only do they allow developers to use their technology in 3rd party webpages, like my own, but they also provide an extremely broader use of their technology, with more functionality and more documentation.

Yahoo! on the other hand just gives you a list of URLs you can use, and how to use GET variables to change the results. Not that impressive, even though you can never tell when there’s something up the sleeve that they just haven’t told everybody yet. Take a look at both and compare:

• Google Maps API
• Yahoo! Maps

My small example using Google’s API maps my current location (latitude and longitude values used for the calculation are aproximations) shows how easily it is to place markers and overlays on Google generated maps. Yahoo! still doesn’t have worldwide coverage, so I didn’t get to try it out just yet.

Anyway, the real point to this post is that these are interesting times. Inumerous ideas bubble up if you think about where you can use this sort of technology, even if we’re still seeing its first steps. My suggestion for people who like to live on the edge of this sort of thing is to keep an eye on the O’Reilly Radar weblog as well as the official Where 2.0 coverage site.