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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#531

Post by bjoli »

sanderjd wrote: post #500
bjoli wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use RSS daily, but I am very much anomaly among my friends. For most people I know RSS just withered and died and got replaced by Facebook or whatever asocial media they are on. I ended up rolling my own server (in scheme using sxml) and writing some minimal clients for it (tui, Emacs and web). It is running on a raspberry pi 2 and is currently using about 5mb of memory (the guile runtime is a large chunk of that)…

Sure, yeah, using RSS is rare, but it always was, and nothing was going to keep the vast majority of people from using Facebook and Twitter instead. I don't understand why you rolled your own server. Feedly works great. If you did it because it's a fun project, that's awesome! But it certainly isn't necessary if your goal is just to subscribe to RSS feeds.

Back then the only alternatives were either commercial with shitty data policies or TTRSS which scared me away as it back then was probably the most hostile open source project on GitHub.

So I rolled my own. I will probably port it to use SQL so I can do easy searching when my kids move out :)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#532

Post by sun_bear »

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…

Exactly. Specifically, for biking or hiking, Google Maps are useless. Mapy.cz can be downloaded (in region chunks) for offline use and are generally a pleasure to use.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#533

Post by m0rphy99 »

6cd6beb wrote: post #55
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…

>In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. ianal and all that, but isn't somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent? I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 mont…

Walmart practically did this but with a little twist back in the days. They opened multiple extra stores within a very small geographical area. Some stores were actually losing money but it didn't matter to them because they used it to completely destroy all competitors in that area and forced them to close up their shops. Once everybody is gone, Walmart has accomplished their mission and then proceeded to shut down the extra stores as well.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#534

Post by roadbeats »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #483
roadbeats wrote: post #345

I would never trust Google as a business partner based on only my personal experiences. Here is a list of problems I had with Google and its services; - Firebase suddenly changed its pricing, claiming that they were calculating prices incorrectly. A tiny multiplayer game that I made for kids were not fitting the free tier anymore, and my account was locked until I make payment. A sudden e-mail at 6am in the morning w…

> Someone began impersonating me using my full name on blogger There are a lot of people in the world so the odds of someone having the same full name as anyone else isn't that low. Was this person impersonating you specifically beyond claiming that they have the same name?

I’m aware of that. It was an impersonation. Someone created a blog under my name and posted blog posts by copy pasting sections from an e-book. Why ? Google Ads :)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#535

Post by emn13 »

pliny wrote: post #354
emn13 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since API's aren't standardized and conversion from one product to another likely requires development work and probably impacts your usage in some way even then - the barriers to switching are high enough that the availability of alternative maps still doesn't represent a whole lot of competition.

This argument is symmetric, it implies all other map providers (who are competitors of google maps and of each other) also have no competitors.

Sure, typically yes. It's not necessary - interoperable APIs exist, and for underdogs they're even attractive as a selling point - but market leaders tend not to play by those rules.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#536

Post by rmc »

Qub3d wrote: post #482
arendtio wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering too why they skipped OpenStreetMap so quickly. Living in Germany, I find the map quality of OSM much better than Google Maps. Sure, it lacks the integration with the other Google services like a good search and live traffic, but speaking about the pure map quality, Google is lacking a lot of detail here.

From the article (emphasis added): "Which maps should we investigate deeper? Some options we could reject quickly for various reasons. OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. Apple Maps, even though we wouldn't mind having Apple logo on our site somewhere, was just released as beta and requires Apple developer account to test properly."

The OpenStreetMap.org website doesn't ban commerical sites (per se). The volunteer sysadmins who manage the donated hardware that runs the OpenStreetMap.org website don't offer any SLA and reserve the right to ban people/apps which put too much load on it. If you don't like it, they're prepared to give you a full refund.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#537

Post by rmc »

freehunter wrote: post #468
schoen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt like the original article's way of phrasing this is slightly misleading, maybe based on confusion on the author's part. As other commenters here have made clear, OSM specifically intends to allow commercial and other downstream uses, but you have to host the tiles yourself or pay someone else to host them. That's certainly different from other services and may involve much more up-front effort and infrastructu…

Are there any sites providing OpenStreetMap-as-a-Service? Something licenses and provided just like the Google Maps API, but using OSM?

Lots! Mapbox.com ThunderForest.com Geofabrik.de

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#538

Post by rmc »

zmk_ wrote: post #455
rmc wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not free as in you are not allowed to use OSM tiling servers for commercial purposes. "OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. [...] OpenStreetMap data is free for everyone to use. Our tile servers are not." [1]. They've even banned some sites for abusing their servers, e.g., FastPokeMap in 2016 [2]. But there is a very clear way of switching to OSM…

Well if you don't like the OSM.org tile usage policy, they'll give you a full refund.

OSM.org doesn't prohibit commericial usage, per se. But if you're running a business, you shouldn't rely on volunteers from another project which you're not paying for.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#539

Post by TimTheTinker »

A lot of people seem to be aware of MapBox and Apple's MapKit as viable alternatives, but Esri's ArcGIS Online also offers a lot of options for online maps, including allowing users to edit and collaborate on feature data.

(disclosure: I'm a developer at Esri)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#540

Post by megous »

Const-me wrote: post #146
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…

> You can try various zoom levels, and mapy.cz is always better. mapy.cz indeed has more data but visually, Google IMO looks better on my Windows PC. Maybe it’s high DPI support, maybe it’s font rendering, but small labels are barely readable in mapy.cz, compare the screenshots yourself: http://const.me/tmp/maps/mapy.png http://const.me/tmp/maps/gm.png BTW, Microsoft did even better: http://const.me/tmp/maps/ms.png

I don't use hidpi, so I can't really compare your screenshots. :) Mapy.cz just looks better on your screenshot to me (aside from blur caused by rendering a screenshot vs direct software rendering optimized for my LCD).
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