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Google Maps has become an eyesore

fastcompany.com

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Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#351

Post by DonHopkins »

When I was at TomTom, they ran a contest for employees to come up with fun ways to gamify their internet-connected GPS Personal Navigation Devices.

Some wise guy came up with the brilliant idea of maintaining a real-time "Top 10 Speeders" leaderboard for every single road on the entire map. Kinda like Foursquare for speeding on local roads. No matter where you were driving in the world, you could instantly see the top ten speeds of other TomTom users who drove down that same stretch of road, and put the pedal to the metal to claim or defend your own spot on the leaderboard!

That one went over like a lead balloon with the legal department.

The only thing worse would be a chat app for texting while driving above the speed limit with other Leaderboard members along the same stretch of road.

They also didn't appreciate my proposal for TomTomagotchi: a simulated personality on your PND that relentlessly begs you to drive it all around town to various interesting places it wants to visit, to improve its mood and satisfy its cravings. (Kind of like having virtual kids!) I'm sure there's a revenue model having drive through Burger Kings and car washes pay for placements.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#352

Post by mnw21cam »

Symbiote wrote: post #334
devnullbrain wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A population of 9 million but big tech's allergy to scaling customer support means they don't pay a local person to adjust things for local expectations. But why would they? We have to use it anyway.

They have a large office in London, so their own staff put up with it. I once met a Googler who had previously worked on maps. I made a few grumbles (railway lines at the time were almost invisible, but very useful for orienting yourself when you exit a station, gardens were grey yet parks were green, "Transit" only shows the London Underground so it misses most of the local rail travel routes in South London, etc).…

I remember when Google changed the colours of roads, and I filed a bug report. Motorways are blue darnit.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#353

Post by reportgunner »

qup wrote: post #59
zbrozek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I prefer navigating with Apple maps after Google Maps stagnated for years and years. Apple's voice instructions are incomparably better.

Apple maps is the only mapping software that's taken me to the wrong place, and it's done it several times. It also tried to put me into a permanent loop once, in Branson. Luckily it was a very small loop, or I might not have noticed, being a tourist.

Apple maps always load slow for me in mobile browser, I give up waiting for the map image to load every time.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#354

Post by mijamo »

coldtea wrote: post #348
Knee_Pain wrote: post #328

The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are. Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

Probably because 99% of normal people "don't refill their water bottles" (and surely not off of water fountains), just buy bottled water and/or drink when they stop at cafes and restaurants? Not saying it's good. In fact, it's quite bad and harmful. But it just is.

This is very location dependant. In southern Europe there are places where most normal people actually would refill their water at the fountain when going through a town, and I have even faced small queues when the fountain is small but a slightly larger group is refilling bottles. In many small towns you don't even have a shop so buying bottles is not even an option. There's sometimes a local bar / restaurant but if you want to just get water that's a bit overkill.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#355

Post by Knee_Pain »

coldtea wrote: post #348
Knee_Pain wrote: post #328

The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are. Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

Probably because 99% of normal people "don't refill their water bottles" (and surely not off of water fountains), just buy bottled water and/or drink when they stop at cafes and restaurants? Not saying it's good. In fact, it's quite bad and harmful. But it just is.

[flagged]

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#356

Post by hgsgm »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #347
AlbertCory wrote: post #34

I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself. Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad. If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Goo…

I know, because they tried to sell it to me when I was at a megacorp, they resell the real time location and local data correlated to user characteristics, as data service to large discrete customers. This includes constant real time information about where people are traveling to, businesses being frequented by demographics, with a sophisticated query interface for asking relatively complex questions of maps derived…

Anywhere you put your data can be read by the people that run the place, regardless of what other products they make.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#357

Post by mnw21cam »

bentcorner wrote: post #45
not_your_vase wrote: post #2

Every time I use Google Maps, I feel so helpless, and frankly, stupid. On Desktop, I simply can't figure it out how to switch to A-B route mode, nor how to trigger street view. I literally just click randomly in a more and more frustrated way until suddenly the option appears. And on Android I just avoid the app. I hate that I couldn't turn off the automatic compass. Every time I finally manage to orient myself when…

> Every time I finally manage to orient myself when in a new place, the map starts spinning like crazy. There's a "Keep North up" option while navigating, and I think if you click the "center map on me" button while not navigating one of the states will keep north up. IMO smartphone compasses and gps are still too noisy to use anything other than "keep north up" as the default. Trying to navigate while your pin spins…

No, tapping the "centre map on me" button switches between auto-twirly and north-is-up-by-default, but even when in north-is-up-by-default mode, it'll still misinterpret you pinching to zoom as thinking you want the map rotated. I hate it. I'd turn on a setting to have North as up always, completely disabling the rotate-by-two-fingers "feature". I can't imagine anyone actually finding that feature useful for anything.

The other setting I'd love to see is to switch off re-framing. Let's say I select a destination, then I'm curious how long it will take to get there, so I select directions. Then I scroll around a bit to see other things nearby and spot something interesting. I tap on it, and try to get directions there too, except directions is already active, so I either have to go through the rigmarole of "add stop, delete the other one", or press the back button a few times to come out of directions. Except when I do, Maps first zooms out to show my entire route, then zooms back in to the original destination, and now I have to scroll around and try and find that second thing again. I'd rather it just left the zoom alone, and let me choose where I want to be looking. Sure, have a button to frame what you're currently looking at if you want, but stop jerking all over the place.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#358

Post by hgsgm »

coldtea wrote: post #348
Knee_Pain wrote: post #328

The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are. Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

Probably because 99% of normal people "don't refill their water bottles" (and surely not off of water fountains), just buy bottled water and/or drink when they stop at cafes and restaurants? Not saying it's good. In fact, it's quite bad and harmful. But it just is.

It's because no one buys ads against water fountains.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#360

Post by DonHopkins »

moomoo11 wrote: post #3

Love Apple Maps. It has progressively gotten so much better and awesome. I don’t think I ever use my iPhone and get frustrated. Leaving android in 2015 was the best decision I made.

"It's Apple Maps Bad"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E

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