Boo! If prominant member means dirty spammer, you're right
World Wind is aimed at different people to GE.
My theory is that Google saw people's reaction to World Wind and thought "hey, we can do that...ooh, let's buy Keyhole which has lots of high-res stuff to make people love us more"
GE generally lets you zoom in further ($$$++++) but WW has far superior US coverage than GE and a few other places around the world and is also open source so it's a lot more extensible, and lots of organisations (including NATO and various US agencies) use it for various things, of which I've only seen unclassified screenshots
World Wind also has more planets than GE (remember Google Moon/Mars? WW had that, well,
ages before Google....there's also add-ons for Saturn/Venus/etc.)
World Wind has more scientific data and so on, and lots more types of Landsat7 data which Google doesn't. That doesn't please the "but I can't see my house" group, ie average Joe, but hey
Talking of London....not at the *moment* - there's only 15meter coverage of the UK (Landsat7). But we have a deal (in principle) with a UK firm for 2 metre imagery (ie 'you can just see your house') of the whole UK. Now we're working out the technical/legal side of things...
The funny thing is that we're taking part in Google's Summer of Code which means that Google is paying us/people to develop World Wind!
World Wind has been around for ages, as has Keyhole (now GE). I dunno which was around first, but I know that neither are unique - they're just more general-public-friendly versions of GIS/imagery applications, which is a huuge field
If you're bored of Earth try
Celestia, pretty much the same thing but in space - very neat program.
pics are slow as even on my 10meg con though.
Which layer are you looking at? The USGS ones are ok most of the time (they're run by MS), the Landsat datasets should be speedy all the time, and the ZoomIt layers should be speedy too.
As for WW's zooming in / usability....I much prefer it to GE. There's some options you can fiddle with to mess with the planet inertia / momentum etc, too.
Edit: and you bet, the Earth is far better from a high resoltion because World Wind uses the stunning Next-Generation Blue Marble which has a different view for each month. It's twice the resoltion of the original famous blue marble and includes relief shading, etc. Google just doesn't bother with Blue Marble/Landsat7 because, well, they'll be making their money from ads shown at street-level.
