641–650 of 705 posts
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>Monetization was a dismal failure. Aren't they charging big money for the API?
Depends. Basically, the API is free if all you do is display a map, keep the Google branding at the bottom, and add a few of those pins. Make one of those pins move because it's actually a car, and suddenly your cheeks are getting clapped with 6+-figure bills.
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Nah, it's just that 99% of people aren't so chronically online as to need a web service to find out how to freely drink water in a place with free water drinking infrastructure.
The extremely detailed mapping of drinking water on OSM that the OP alludes to, is more helpful than you assume. If you are cycling or hiking in baking-hot Southern Europe, or wandering through some picturesque villages, there are often springs hidden just off the trail that most people would never spot, if the map didn’t alert people to their presence. Also, with OSM one doesn’t need to be “chronically online” and u…
This is in the US even. Working drinking fountains are not as ubiquitous as you might think in a lot of areas.
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I believe it, but do you have a source? I have a few friends I'd like to inform of this.
Funny, because I was wrong. Here’s the Nvidia privacy policy: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/privacy-policy/ How I was wrong is was in the “valuable debugging information”. Because you can actually disable the sending of debug and crash statistics, but you cannot disable the collection of tracking everything you do except for password boxes! The original source on the telemetry was a print magazine, Canard…
For EU-based customers, how can this be GDPR-compliant?
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?
Google Maps often misses paths in parks that OSM has. I don't mean obscure trails deep in national forests, I mean paved paths in city parks. Google maps seems optimized for directing people to businesses that might advertise with Google, anything else languishes.
Apple Maps is even worse, I don't think they even offer a way to update incorrect data -- not that I've been able to find. And it's super frustrating to use, because Apple Maps does not have a "Bicycle" layer that you can turn on and off to find pathways. They only appear if you plan a route. Totally idiotic.
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…
One of my biggest peeves with Google Maps is its lack of respect for my zoom level. When I tap the centering button, NO, I don't want to zoom in. If I wanted to zoom in, I'd zoom in! Couple that with the roughly decade-old removal of the +/- zoom buttons, and I basically don't bother with Google Maps any more except for turn-by-turn navigation.
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Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product, there's a mass of sycophants that crawl out of the ground to say "nobody wants that, you're just a weirdo" ? Everybody drinks water. It often isn't intuitively obvious where you can find water. Even in city parks, water fountains may not be where you expect but often are where you wouldn't. Google maps also su…
> Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product Is it reasonable though?
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One of my biggest peeves with Google Maps is its lack of respect for my zoom level. When I tap the centering button, NO, I don't want to zoom in. If I wanted to zoom in, I'd zoom in! Couple that with the roughly decade-old removal of the +/- zoom buttons, and I basically don't bother with Google Maps any more except for turn-by-turn navigation.
Why do you need +/- zoom buttons? You can just double-tap the screen but hold down the second tap, then slide your finger up or down to zoom in/out as an alternative to pinch-zooming.
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> There was no device that would tell me a) the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, b) when the store I am going will close, and c) how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month. There is a free Android (+ iOS) app…
Transit looks like a nice app. I assume it's based on the open data initiatives in places where it works (France etc.). There's similar iniatives in many places now (Japan has one as well) and I'm pretty much rooting for more of those. You're still left patchworking all these apps, switching from one another at every point and assembling everything in notes by yourself. It's super nice it can be done at all, but I'd…
There's not much patchworking/assembling once you bookmark your preferred locations, research what times they open/close, select favorite transit modes, bookmark specific lines, research which exact stops. Don't mentally lock into Google Maps as your primary thing.
I said the c) part is already done by Transit App and generally better than Google Maps (shows rideshare time-and-cost estimates, bikeshare/scooter pickup locations etc.) Where 'taxi' has generally been replaced by rideshare and by 'private bike networks' you mean bikeshare. Not sure if by 'private bus network' you mean coaches, or employee shuttles, but those are sometimes not open to the public. (Can you cite us an example location and name the private network companies?)
As mentioned, the amount of local detail depends on how much your municipality participates in open-date initatives; if it doesn't, ask them to. Transit App is adding new regions constantly.
