Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
medium.com
Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
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Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#2Well worth a read. The article considers why facebook bought this. Maybe to help other competitors to facebook, cause they will be giving away all their mapping data for commercial use now.
Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#3Recent threads on the acquisition announcement:
Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#4My guess would have been AR being the biggest driving force. Oh, and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be “placed in context” on the map. Especially given Facebook’s “sell the users” business model, an accurate map of where the users are with respect to where the advertisers are would be quite useful to them (and it wouldn’t do to depend on Google, since they’ll butt heads as advertising platforms).
Making the platform free to commercial users as well might be more in line with Facebook’s business models — I’m guessing they’d rather create an API which allows them to exfiltrate end-user data, than charge companies for using their API.
Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#5My guess would have been AR being the biggest driving force. Oh, and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be “placed in context” on the map. Especially given Facebook’s “sell the users” business model, an accurate map of where the users are with respect to where the advertisers are would be quite useful to them (and it wouldn’t do to depend on Google, since they’ll butt heads as advertising platforms).…
> an accurate map of where the users are with respect to where the advertisers are
Not just advertisers - accurate location context information can (on it's own or in combination with other data) de-"anonymise" location data[1]. Any new sources of data that Facebook can correlate with their existing hoard of data increases the precision of their model of everyone's pattern-of-life.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...
Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#6Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads so you can add them to OSM which street view does not allow.
Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#7My guess would have been AR being the biggest driving force. Oh, and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be “placed in context” on the map. Especially given Facebook’s “sell the users” business model, an accurate map of where the users are with respect to where the advertisers are would be quite useful to them (and it wouldn’t do to depend on Google, since they’ll butt heads as advertising platforms).…
> and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be “placed in context”
When you factor in their ML prowess [i] it's not hard to imagine that every photo you submit w̶i̶l̶l̶ is getting automagically tagged with an astonishing amount of context: who, what, when, and where (why too since they have all of your chats/messages too).
Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#8Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads…
I agree the quality of the images are very poor. Why go through all that effort of data collection with such inferior hardware? Most of the images are completely unusable.
Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#9Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads…
I agree the quality of the images are very poor. Why go through all that effort of data collection with such inferior hardware? Most of the images are completely unusable.
I wouldn't all them completely unusable, they are just vastly inferior to googles. Personally I captured a bunch of images. If I was going somewhere already and the area was uncaptured I would just stick my phone up and capture the road. Then I would later go over the images and add things in to open street map.
Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?
#10Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads…
I agree the quality of the images are very poor. Why go through all that effort of data collection with such inferior hardware? Most of the images are completely unusable.
A lot of them are crowdsourced, Mapillary lets anyone contribute street view images