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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#301

Post by DoreenMichele »

paulie_a wrote: post #300
DoreenMichele wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your opinion. What I am telling you is that it isn't consistent with cultural norms here. If you don't wish to use the disclaimer "IANAL" (I am not a lawyer) -- which I am spelling out because your comment says Imanal , which looks like gibberish to me -- then you are free to not use it. But most people here aren't likely to agree with you.

Bickering over a misspelling is pretty petty

I'm not bickering.

This is the internet. All I have to go by is the actual writing on my screen. I was merely being as accurate and clear as I know how to be and not assuming it was a misspelling. I was merely covering all bases to make sure we are as on the same page as possible.

That's what pedants do.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#302

Post by bryanrasmussen »

laGrenouille wrote: post #182
ajross wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable . I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes. As it turns out, y…

The problem isn’t that Google wants to charge for a service. The issue is that they offered it for years for free or below cost effectively price gouging any competition. Now, with no alternatives they jack up the price. Classic monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour.

mapbox is totally a reasonable alternative, and in a lot of cases you can build something quickly with leaflet that gives you everything you need.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#303

Post by DoreenMichele »

cornholio wrote: post #298
DoreenMichele wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's cool for you. But you are a relative newcomer here, at least your handle is (yes, pot, meet kettle -- but I've been here 9 years and quite a few people know that) and reputation, merit of the info, etc matters to quite a lot of the members here. It matters in part because truth matters to a lot of people here. Actual reality matters to a lot of people here. It's a bunch of pedants. And if you want to mak…

> bunch of pedants. > mods will ban you for trolling. This culture, while nice, cannot scale. At some point or another, an online community becomes an image of the wider social community it serves, regardless of the intentions of the founders or ephemeral royalty. Just like Facebook or Reddit (d)evolved, HN cannot forever maintain a 70s hacker ethos and mannerisms. At some point or another the current reality of toda…

This culture, while nice, cannot scale

I can't say that I agree with you.

I have a history of joining forums, watching them grow dramatically while I'm there, leaving and watching them become a shell of their former selves afterwards. I spent some years feeling like a forum killer and afraid of the power I appeared to wield, but didn't understand and didn't feel in control of.

I have not played such a central role on HN. But it is quite clear in my mind that the right cultural practices are critical to making a large forum live and breathe at all. Because if they are enforced by only one person and that person walks out the door, the forum collapses in upon itself and traffic shrinks to a level that can be sustained by the cultural practices that remain.

I think this is a battle worth fighting. Merely agreeing with your point of view and throwing in the towel guarantees defeat.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#304

Post by timmy-turner »

voltagex_ wrote: post #291
exhilaration wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to write it yourself - the article mentions using Leaflet https://leafletjs.com/ for just such a purpose.

When I last looked at this, using Google Maps tiles with Leaflet was against the ToS.

Right, just using the plain gmaps tiles in a Leaflet tile layer is against the google TOS. But there is a Leaflet plugin that puts the whole google map component in a TOS-compliant way as a layer into leaflet and keeps both in sync with DOM observers. Sounds pretty weird but works perfectly in production.

https://gitlab.com/IvanSanchez/Leaflet.GridLayer.GoogleMutan...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#305

Post by jhall1468 »

rurban wrote: post #283
apatters wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pricing change is understandably very frustrating for users of Google Maps who are affected, but it seems like a big win to me for everyone in the mapping market. Google is trading away a monopoly position (and related regulatory risk) in exchange for increased revenue so it's a win for them. It's a win for other mappers because now they can compete on price. It's a win for users because they are getting more cho…

But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It's named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also.

> But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same.

There's a great deal of competition and that generally results in a race to the bottom. The market leader just removed themselves from the market and the best way to capitalize is stay low and build your userbase.

We won't see price changes by any of these companies. They all want to be #1.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#306

Post by voltagex_ »

timmy-turner wrote: post #304
voltagex_ wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I last looked at this, using Google Maps tiles with Leaflet was against the ToS.

Right, just using the plain gmaps tiles in a Leaflet tile layer is against the google TOS. But there is a Leaflet plugin that puts the whole google map component in a TOS-compliant way as a layer into leaflet and keeps both in sync with DOM observers. Sounds pretty weird but works perfectly in production. https://gitlab.com/IvanSanchez/Leaflet.GridLayer.GoogleMutan...

Probably spirit vs letter of the law there. Hopefully performance has improved since the last time I looked (3 years ish)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#308

Post by jhall1468 »

google_censors wrote: post #236
kirchhoff wrote: post #45

It's as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative. I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / month. Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been…

Please contact the US Department of Justice and let them know about how the price increase is affecting you in regards to Street View. They seemed to buy into my reasoning that Google has effectively made sure that they won't have any Street View competition by artificially keeping prices low for years. The more people that complain, the sooner the DOJ will probably take action. For European users I recommend complai…

Bing Streetside and OpenStreetCam are a thing. They just aren't very good. There's a huge up-front investment for street view images that other companies didn't want to take.

Microsoft invested in it, released a product and the product wasn't as good as the market leader. That's not predatory.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#309

Post by jhall1468 »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #173
bflesch wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get into trouble with your unit economics given such a raise, then you really need to think about your business model. How much value is your business really creating ON TOP of the maps? I don't want to be snarky, but I think many businesses don't think enough about this issue of value creation.

Name one business that can absorb a 20x increase in a component cost.

Name one billion dollar business that is a success today when 80% of its product is an API call to an externally owned service?

I get the frustration and pain with this, but let's be honest, if your business was totally reliant on Google Maps it probably wasn't a great business to begin with. Way too many eggs in a basket you don't own.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#310

Post by magicbuzz »

kirchhoff wrote: post #45

It's as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative. I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / month. Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been…

If you read the original article, it gives you the impression that it's tiles only. But as you point out it's a lot of different parts of the Maps service going up by usually an order of magnitude at least.

I run a geocoding service for Australia specifically (https://geocodeplus.com.au) and a lot of people I talk to are completely unaware that they're going to see a x10 change in what their forward/reverse geocoding is going to cost them.

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