Today I had the good fortune to run into some of the folks from the MapQuest team on the SxSW tradeshow floor. For some months now they've had a beta version of their service online which has made extensive use of Dojo and DWR (our sister Dojo Foundation project) to improve the user experience of the world's largest mapping service. This past week MapQuest flipped the switch and the improvement in usability over the previous UI is noticeable while still retaining much of the traditional MapQuest task flow. MapQuest has a gigantic user-base and introducing new features on a product that large is no small feat, particularly when a well-understood UI has helped the site preserve its huge traffic numbers all these years. If the Beta is any version, there's tons of great stuff in the pipeline which didn't make it into last weeks launch, including dojox.gfx-based features like pin-drop annotations. It'll be exciting to see how the MapQuest crew rolls those features out to their massive audience.

Our hearty congrats to the MapQuest team on launching!