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Farewell, Google Maps

inderapotheke.de

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#161

Post by mmel »

jseliger wrote: post #142
Zaskoda wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love.

I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love. This is the platform Maps.me is based on, correct? I ask because I downloaded Maps.me the other day, after reading HN, and have found it to be missing most businesses that I've attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations. I too want Google/Apple maps alternatives to suc…

>there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations. Unless Maps.Me use their own database for business listings, you just edit the map directly from openstreetmap.org or one of the many fat client map editors that are out there.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#162

Post by dymk »

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 disagree that the competitor is anywhere better for the links you just posted.

Not only does the mapy.cz version look terribly blurry compared to Google Maps, it doesn't do nearly as good of a job putting interesting waypoints in the right location (e.g. the label for "Prague" or the river name going along the river).

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#163

Post by komali2 »

anarazel wrote: post #118
ericd wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not worried about liability, just letting people know that there's a very good chance that I've completely misinterpreted the law. Maybe you're right and it's not useful.

FWIW, I find it helpful. Stating the level of confidence, and that's what IANAL is to some degree, is helpful in judging a statement.

Warning: completely unrelated to thread topic.

Poor grandparent got nuked in the votes, but I actually think this is an interesting discussion. It ties to my thoughts about politeness and behavior on the internet, which ties to my thoughts about the same IRL. Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends" type stuff.

Is it effective to "hedge" your arguments/posts/words with a "now I might be wrong" / "you may know more about this than me" / "I'm not a lawyer" ? I spent 4 years hearing sales gurus tell me to not do it, exude confidence. Then I had Dale Carnegie and my favorite manager ever tell me the exact opposite. I've tried both, and the "Carnegie" method seems to work best for me both online and off.

It's not just "IANAL" - the most positive responses I've seen on reddit, twitter, and here have some sort of "hedge." When I employ it, I get great responses (and lots of upvotes, which is other than response rate and quality of responses the only measure we can really use). When I don't, I get downvotes.

Sometimes the "confident asshole" approach works here and on reddit, but it can backfire HORRIBLY - see the absolute nightmare situation happening over at ArenaNet - some guy didn't quite hedge in the right way and caused a total breakdown of community/developer trust. What a mess. I bet the developer wouldn't have felt quite so attacked if the commentor had hedged a bit better. See also, any email chain Linus Torvald gets involved in.

Now this just starts a whole other discussion about whether someone should "have to" hedge, etc etc. I'm just voicing my thoughts here, curious what others think.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#164

Post by Spectral »

I work for a startup who's job is to primarily help people find places on a map (free to users, no ads) so this change affected us by a great extent.

As I'm working through implementing google's suggested best practices and ways to cut down on API calls, it's still quite a shocking realization that each ONE map load (aka any user that loads our site) costs us almost a cent a piece (0.7 per Dynamic Maps load to be exact)

https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/understanding-cos...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#165

Post by lucb1e »

dom96 wrote: post #60

Google really needs to stop treating their customers and users so badly. Slightly offtopic: I have been trying to get Google to fix the location of my flat on Maps for years now. I have reported it multiple times to them and it is still unfixed. Does anyone know a more direct way I can get in touch with them?

Try openstreetmap.org, there user contributions are always welcome :)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#166

Post by snarf21 »

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…

I think there is a different reason for charging for StreetView. The need to make their money back and quick. Self driving cars will have cameras that will give reasonable results for a lot of use cases (maybe not 360 but who cares). It is also a potential combo monetization strategy for the autonomous vendor.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#167

Post by dalore »

reaperducer wrote: post #79
6cd6beb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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 months, and then jacked up their prices to 100 times what they used to be before going free, that'd be pretty illegal. This is what drug dealers do. It was also the plot of the James Bond film Live and Let Die .

Are you saying drug dealers go around giving their product for free until no competition or we are hooked?

I don't really think that happens at all. If so where are they?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#168

Post by Spectral »

woohoo7676 wrote: post #35

I work for a startup that has mapping/routing as one of its core needs - about a year or two ago we decided that our reliance on Google's mapping APIs was too great and decided to work on having a switchable backup provider in case something like this should ever happen. With auto complete especially, we would have had a 10-20x increase in pricing (and this is with an 'enterprise' plan pricing). As the article says,…

I would be interested in the details on this as well, as we heavily use mapping, routing/directions, autocomplete.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#169

Post by lucb1e »

chadlavi wrote: post #17

TIL there is a paid API for google maps, I just assumed it was free to use. Seems pretty nickel-and-dimey.

You're being downvoted, but it's important that people read this comment. The vast majority of Google Maps users helpfully do everything Google asks of them, not realizing that they are contributing towards a monopoly that is definitely not free to use for anything other than personal use. Or might even find it fair that they can piggyback on other people's paid usage (see also: Dropbox).

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#170

Post by foobarbazetc »

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…

Google did something similar with Stackdriver logging, where they went from a generous free tier to an insanely expensive $.50/Gb in roughly 2-3 months.

Very annoying. Especially because by default every GCP service logs a bunch of crap to Stackdriver.

Our log cost was going to be as high as our compute cost.

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