Scoble says both Yahoo! Maps and Virtual Earth are doomed: “it’s not about maps, it’s about the advertising platform that Google has built. It’s not about prettiness, it’s about who has the most user generated content (I still hate that term)” (his emphasis). He argues that advertising opportunities and licencing restrictions will, regardless of the relative quality of each mapping platform, keep mashup-makers on the Google side of the fence. It’s a plausible explanation of why so few user-generated maps have been made with Virtual Earth or Yahoo! APIs.