Last week the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which has tracked Santa since 1955, announced its new Internet Santa service and they replaced Google Maps with Microsoft’s Bing Maps. NORAD had been using Google Maps since 2007 and offers three different Smartphone apps to track Santa through Bing maps available on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 8 smartphones.
According to ABC news, NORAD’s Tracks Santa app has been downloaded nearly 922,000 times through Apple’s iTunes plus nearly 558,000 times for Android users and 2,500 times for Windows Phone 8 users from December 12 to December 18 or so. As for website visitors, 29% of the website visitors are from the UK, 7% are from Canada and 5% are from Japan. In addition, NORAD’s Tracks Santa has a Twitter following of around 95,000, a Facebook page with over a million likes, over 4,000 Google+ subscribers and a YouTube video with over 1 million views as well.
However, Google is still in the business of tracking Santa using its Google Earth and Google Maps products along with a new algorithm for its Santa Tracker. The Google blog reports that you will be able to use Google Maps and Google Earth starting around 2:00 am PST Christmas Eve to keep track of Santa.
Perhaps fortunately, there appears to be no Santa tracking service using Apple Maps and let us hope Santa himself has chosen a more reliable mapping service to avoid getting lost on Christmas Eve!
With that in mind, which Santa tracker do you think is the best to use (or the the more accurate one!), NORAD’s based on Microsoft’s Bing Maps or the Google offering?
Of course Norad is the best for kids. If they only could replace santa’s travelling face with santa in his sleigh with reindeers it would be perfect.