11/18/09–Last spring, ESRI announced that it would be migrating its hosted ArcGIS Online map services to the Google Maps/Bing Maps tiling
scheme. This migration is expected to be completed in December 2009.
This change is in response to feedback from many ArcGIS users who have requested that ESRI use a common map tiling scheme matching other popular online map providers. The new services
will particularly enable ArcGIS web developers to more easily combine popular
web map services with ArcGIS Online map services including those from Bing
Maps, Google Maps, and other providers that use the same web map tiling scheme.
The existing services in the ArcGIS Online tiling scheme
will remain available for at least six months and, depending on demand,
may remain available longer. Although the services will remain
available, the content in these services will no longer be updated.
For details about the migration, see Migrating map tiling schemes in ArcGIS Online Help.
If you have questions, please post them to our forum
at http://forums.esri.com/forums.asp?c=188.
Can we please get an update on when the old map services will be retired? Six months from the date of this blog post would be May 18th (next week). Seems a new estimate for service retirement is due.