The future of online mapping... is Here!

I stumbled on Blaise Aguera y Arcas' TED talk (which led to this talk) from Cameron Moll's twitter feed which opened up to me the world of Seadragon, Photosynth, and the new Bing maps.  I guess I've been neglecting Microsoft to my own detriment.
Let's look at Seadragon, which revolutionizes the concept of image browsing, allowing users to pan and zoom hi-res iamges as easily and smoothly as they do an online map.  I remember seeing an application that used the Google Maps interface to pan and zoom large photos, which I thought was really ingenious but it looked like it only garnered a niche following if that.  Now the concept has gone mainstream under Arcas' touch at MS and the result is stunning.  Here's an example of Yosemite.  You'll need Silverlight to view it, but it's worth it (and I never advocate downloading non-standard components, but this is an exception).
The future is here.  We as internet community contributors, sharing our thoughts and images and lives with a global community, are more and more able to recreate our experiences online to share with the world (and not through VR fluff which doesn't count because the idea is to escape reality in those games).  Some call it augmented reality.  I call it the reality, because that's the direction our world is heading.