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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#381

Post by yread »

megous wrote: post #75

> Google Maps is objectively the best product on its market, in many regards positioned light years ahead of its competitors. No. Google maps is an absolute, washed out turd style wise. We have much better local competitor. Compare this: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.081478,14.4272906,13z https://mapy.cz/zakladni?x=14.4068130&y=50.0892746&z=13 You can try various zoom levels, and mapy.cz is always better. Much more…

I agree that's it's much more map-like. You're not looking at a map to rest your eyes with gray mess.

They also have an API that's completely free also for commercial purposes (and they have coverage for Poland)

https://api.mapy.cz

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#382

Post by nevi-me »

I've incurred $30 since the switch for my website. At about $10 a day, I'd have to pay at least $100 a month (after their $200) discount. By contrast, I pay $170 for my server.

I looked at available options, and have been hesitant to switch to another. The article mentions Mapbox's pricing opacity. I tried Mapbox a while ago, to be surprised that map interactions (zooming and loading new tiles) counted as usage. I used up quite a bit in an afternoon of playing around with maps.

I'm going to try host tiles myself from next month. I've embarked on a Rustification effort where I'm seeing RAM and CPU savings by porting some services to Rust. Hopefully I'll have spare capacity to host map tiles.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#383

Post by rbrtdrmpc- »

rmc wrote: post #337
rurban wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I'm not sure what you mean with "free"/"open". The OSM licence has a share-alike part if you merge your own map data with OSM data. If you just have a map and put points on it, it'd be fine.

I've worked for european companies with revenues on the scale of tens of millions of euros using OSM for the same reason of the OP (and Google offered "deals" like the ones Al Capone used to offer in NYC)

1) follow the OSM copyright rules (easy) 2) share your new data with the open ones you are using with the same license (tricky, but not hard at all) 3) design your tile CDN infrastructure (the hardest) 4) if you need to mock Google map tile layout, take a deep breath, it's fucking hell (hell as stated before)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#384

Post by hoffs »

ericd wrote: post #7

"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…

If you are relying on other services that heavily, it sounds like you didn't have such a great business to start with

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#385

Post by danShumway »

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #314
auslander wrote: post #252

> we would be wary on taking free Google Analytics for granted It is not free. Your users pay for that with their privacy and Google gets your user's browsing history for free. It is unfair and you should not have used it in the first place.

Their "I am not a robot" captcha is in similar vein. If I am training your machine learning models by manually clicking on pictures, I need access to the trained model. I have refused to use dozens of service which required me to click pictures to prove that "I am not a robot" and sent the service provider an email informing them of my decision. I would urge everyone to do the same.

Not sure where it falls on your ethics continuum, but it's not that hard to tell the difference between a pre-labeled and unlabled picture in a Google Captcha.

I've started noticing that if you're sneaky you can get a surprisingly large tolerance for error. I've no idea how effective that actually is at poisoning results.

There is an (admittedly a little nasty) part of my brain that really likes the idea that if I'm being asked to provide free labor for a proprietary company, then I'm not really under any obligation to be a great worker.

Just refusing to use the service is probably more effective though.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#386

Post by PDoyle »

hoffs wrote: post #384
ericd wrote: post #7

"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…

If you are relying on other services that heavily, it sounds like you didn't have such a great business to start with

Ever worked at a startup?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#387

Post by dmurray »

da_chicken wrote: post #285
wwweston wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I've experienced the frustration of having a formerly free service develop paid tiers (and policies that put me in those tiers), of all the changes a software service can make, this is the one that frustrates me the least, or at any rate less than: * shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service * changing your terms of service to forbid an ac…

> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service. It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see…

> It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable.

Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#388

Post by phicoh »

komali2 wrote: post #187
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ArenaNet situation sounds interesting. Could you post a link to it? I don't see much in search results.

Here's a couple analyses: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17565218/arenanet-guild-w... https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/10/17550276/guild-wars-2-aren... https://www.pcgamer.com/fired-arenanet-dev-calls-dismissal-a... In short, a woman working at ArenaNet, the company running GuildWars2 (an MMORPG), posted a twitter thread about her thoughts on designing narratives in an MMO. A prominent (male) streamer of the game r…

Just my opinion of course, but I see the basic problem as employees using twitter. Many companies encourage employees to use twitter, social media, etc. for more direct interaction with customers, the community, etc.

What is often overlooked, is that in communication you are first an employee of a company, and your own opinions and feelings come way later.

As is clear in this example, not everybody can do this (all of the time).

She is certainly entitled to this opinion. But as an employee, she should not have expressed it. Most likely the company didn't reflect on this before allowing/encouraging her to use twitter to communicate.

I'm speculating that the company didn't have a communication strategy to contain a shit storm. And in the end just fired the employee. Firing the employee only makes sense if she has a history of causing the kinds of issues.

Again, just my personal opinion.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#389

Post by Dannymetconan »

hoffs wrote: post #384
ericd wrote: post #7

"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…

If you are relying on other services that heavily, it sounds like you didn't have such a great business to start with

The only alternative would be to develop everything in house and to purchase and run your own servers.
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