Posts tagged Maps
Bing Maps Updates Map Pins, Adds Drag & Drop Routes & More
Mar 15th
The Bing Maps Blog announced several enhancements to Bing Maps. In summary, the changes include: A refresh to the Pushpin buttons and Popup menu Transit symbols and icons were improved Added sharing options to transit directions Ability to now drag to modify your route The explore venue maps option…
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Apple, Foursquare Ditch Google Maps for OpenStreetMap
Mar 10th
Is Google’s decision to charge sites or apps using Google Maps API for high volume usage beginning to backfire? Apple and Foursquare have both severed ties with Google Maps, instead opting to use a free alternative, OpenStreetMap.
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Associated Press To Use Google Maps For Super Tuesday Results
Mar 6th
Just a week after Foursquare said it would drop Google Maps, the Associated Press announced it will use the application to distribute Super Tuesday primary results to AP Election Services subscribers. AP will supply the feed of vote results and subscribers will be able to use Google Maps to display…
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Weekly Wrap-up: Foursquare Ditches Google Maps and More Top Stories
Mar 3rd
Foursquare drops the Google Maps API to use OpenStreetMap. We show you an insider’s look at how Google search works. The Pirate Bay starts using unstoppable Magnet Links. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.
After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
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Foursquare Dumps Google & Goes Open-Source for Maps
Foursquare announced it would no longer be using the Google Maps API to power it’s maps, instead choosing to use the open source map solution, OpenStreetMap. Foursquare cited Google’s decision to start charging for access as the primary reason for the shift.
How Google Search Really Works
Jon sits down with Google Fellow, Ben Gomes, to discover the inner workings of search. Ben tells the story of a single search query, from beginning to end. This is a must read post for those of you who are fascinated by search.
The Pirate Bay Switches from Torrents to Untraceable Magnet Links
The Pirate Bay announced it will stop linking to .torrent files and will instead begin using Magnet Links. These links are more stable, more efficient, and unless the entire page is removed, they’re unstoppable.
More Top Posts:
Three New Tools Bring Machine Learning Insights to the Masses
Over the past few years, machine learning has quickly become the “secret sauce” of large-scale web sites. Machine learning systems have historically been hand-crafted by the small armies of computer science and mathematics Ph.D.s in employ at places like Google. With the growing popularity of machine learning and other statistical techniques, the demand for so-called “data scientists” (software developers and analysts with the skill to apply statistical techniques to large data sets) has exploded since 2010. More
The Only 5 Things That Matter at Mobile World Congress
It’s easy to get distracted at Mobile World Congress: There are some 60,000 people here in Barcelona, hundreds of booths, some product announcements, and – oh, right – an entire conference of panels and keynotes going on in the background.
But there are five things at Mobile World Congress that actually matter. More
With E-Book Ban, Apple’s “Closed” Nature Goes Too Far [HOT TOPIC]
It’s easy to take jabs at Apple for sometimes being too “closed.” From restrictions on mobile apps to the limited customizability of the iPad, it’s a reputation that the company has earned even as it sells millions upon millions of devices. Even the original Macintosh infamously discouraged tinkerers by requiring specialized tools to physically open it up. More
Google+ Announces Drug War Debate via Hangout
Google announced a new Hangout video show called Versus today on the YouTube blog. It’s a partnership with Intelligence², a worldwide forum based in the U.K. that has hosted debates for radio and television since 2002. Well-known participants debate a proposed motion, and the audience can vote in real time on the value of the arguments. More
How To Pimp Your Facebook Habits
Love it, hate it, but you will use Facebook. comScore released a report yesterday saying that we use Facebook 19 times more than Twitter and an astounding 135 times than Google+. And while our average time on Google+ was down to 3.3 minutes for the month of January, we now collectively spend about one in seven of our online minutes on Facebook. More
Delicious Founder Creates New People Search Engine, Skills.to
Joshua Schachter and his team of star developers at TastyLabs have begun work on a second project, an endorsement and people search engine called Skills.to. The site lets you endorse people for their skills in various fields, see what the people you know have been endorsed for and search for people with particular skills. More
![[UPDATED] Amazon & Google Getting Impatient With Book Publishers](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/images/google_books_header.png)
[UPDATED] Amazon & Google Getting Impatient With Book Publishers
All is not well in the e-book market. Amazon and Google have each scaled back some e-book programs in the past week because business was weaker than expected. Both e-book sellers are having trouble doing business with publishers. More
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Nathon Fillion Demonstrates His “Google Maps Pose”
Mar 2nd
Last week on Jimmy Kimmel Live, actor Nathon Fillion demonstrated his Google Maps Pose. He described how he was outside of his new home and noticed that the Google Maps Street View car was approaching. He had to act fast and think up his “Google Maps Pose.” He then demonstrated the pose…
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Foursquare Dumps Google & Goes Open-Source for Maps
Feb 29th
Foursquare just made what it called “a little announcement”, but it’s really not little at all. It’s switching away from the Google Maps API to OpenStreetMap. For the map images, it hired MapBox, a start-up that makes pretty maps out of OpenStreetMap data. Starting with foursquare.com, foursquare’s maps now use MapBox Streets.
Foursquare cites Google’s decision to start charging for access to the Google Maps API in October as the reason it started looking for alternatives. But it sounds like it just made more sense to the team philosophically, too. “We love the idea of open data,” the announcement says, “and were happy to try it out.”
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Lots of businesses built on top of Google Maps have been switching providers lately. Foursquare’s blog post points to StreetEasy, Nestoria and Fubra, all of whom went with open data. We also covered the decision by AllTrails, a network for outdoors enthusiasts, to start backing away from Google before its launch.
Google’s decision to charge for API access could not have been made lightly, especially considering the importance of Foursquare. But it may have been inevitable. “Overall it’s healthy for the ecosystem,” John Musser of Programmable Web told us when Google announced the change. “Services need to be sustainable with business models that work for both sides.”
It’s also hard to ignore Google’s efforts to compete with foursquare directly. Its mobile Hotpot app, Google Places recommendations and Google Latitude check-ins all seem like ways to crowd out Foursquare, although why there are so many overlapping Google apps for this is hard to understand. There are also Google+ check-ins, which will be the social glue that ties them all together.
So now Foursquare and Google are direct competitors. When you use Foursquare Explore on the Web to search for places, you’ll be taking eyeballs away from Google. Moreover, Foursquare is now a major patron of open-source software. Not only will it support the work of the people building OpenStreetMap, it will also let Foursquare contribute to the open-source Leaflet Javascript library, which powers the maps.
Foursquare’s iPhone and Android apps won’t be affected, because they use the mapping components integrated with those operating systems, both of which use Google Maps. But Foursquare’s data are now independent of Google, and that’s no “little announcement.”
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Microsoft And Nokia Unify Maps On PC, Mobile
Feb 28th
Microsoft and Nokia announced the fruit of their recent mapping collaboration today. Each company has a blog post describing what’s changed and improved (Bing, Nokia). The effort comes out of the companies’ strategic partnership in mobile. As part of that arrangement Microsoft is…
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Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps?
Feb 26th
How do machines understand what place you’re talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that’s how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn’t a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market.
Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just what the world of location-based services needs in order to grow to meet its potential. It’s called OpenGeocoder and it’s not like other systems that translate and normalize data.
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Google Maps says you can only use its geocoder to display data on maps but sometimes developers want to use geo data for other purposes, like content filtering. Yahoo has great geocoding technology but no one trusts it will be around for long. Open Street Map (OSM) is under a particular Creative Commons license and “exists for the ideological minority,” says Coast himself in a Tweet this week. And so Coast, who now works at Microsoft, has decided to solve the problem himself.
This has been tried before, see for example GeoCommons, but the OpenGeocoder approach is different. It is, as one geo hacker put it, “either madness or genius.”
The way OpenGeocoder works is that users can search for any place they like, by any name they like. If the site knows where that place is, it will be shown on a big Bing map. If it doesn’t, then the user is encouraged to draw that place on the map themselves and then save it.
Above: The river of my childhood, which I just added to the map.
Every single different way a place can be described must be drawn on the map or added as a synonym, before OpenGeocoder will understand what that string of letters and numbers means with reference to place. Anyone can redraw a place on the map, too.
Then developers of location-based services can hit a JSON API or download a dump of all the place names and locations for use in understanding place searches in their own apps. It appears that just under 1,000 places have been added so far. It will take a serious barn-raising to build out a map of the world this way. It wouldn’t be the first time something a little like this has been done before though.
“If only it was that simple 
” said map-loving investor Steven Feldman on Twitter. “Maybe it is?”
The approach is focused largely on simplicity. Coast said in his blog post announcing the project:
“OpenGeocoder starts with a blank database. Any geocodes that fail are saved so that anybody can fix them. Dumps of the data are available.
“There is much to add. Behind the scenes any data changes are wikified but not all of that functionality is exposed. It lacks the ability to point out which strings are not geocodable (things like “a”) and much more. But it’s a decent start at what a modern, crowd-sourced, geocoder might look like.”
Testing the site, I grew frustrated quickly. I searched for the neighborhood I live in: Cully in Portland, Oregon. There was no entry for it, so I added one. But there are no street names on the map so I got lost. I had to open a Google Map in the next tab and switch back and forth between them in order to find my neighborhood on the OpenGeocoder map. Then, the neighborhood isn’t a perfect rectangle, so drawing the bounding box felt frustratingly inexact. I did it anyway, saved, then tried recalling my search. I found that Cully,Portland,Oregon (without spaces) was undefined, even though I’d just defined Cully, Portland, Oregon with spaces. I pulled up the defined area, then searched for the undefined string, then hit the save button, and the bounding box snapped back to the default size, requiring me to redraw it again, on a map with no street names. Later, I learned how to find the synonym adding tool to solve that problem.
In other words, the user experience is a challenge. That’s the case with Wikipedia too, and OpenGeocoder just launched, but I expect it will need some meaningful UX tweaks before it can get a lot of traction.
I hope it does.
That’s just my experience so far, though. Not everyone feels that way. GIS geek Paul Wither calls it “addictive.”
There are certainly high hopes for the project, too.
“I’m obsessed with the need for an open-source geocoder, and this is a fascinating take on the problem,” says data hacker Pete Warden about OpenGeocoder. “By doing a simple string match, rather than trying to decompose and normalize the words, a lot of the complexity is removed. This is either madness or genius, but I’m hoping the latter. The tradeoff will be completely worthwhile if it makes it more likely that people will contribute.”
Coast will certainly be able to gather the attention of the geo community for the project. As we wrote when he joined the Bing team 18 months ago:
Coast is a giant figure in the mapping world. In 2009, readers of leading geo publication Directions Magazine voted him the 2nd most influential person in the geospatial world, ahead of the Google Maps leadership and behind only Jack Dangermond, the dynamic founder of 41-year old $2 billion GIS company ESRI. Coast will turn 30 years old next month.
The more I play with OpenGeocoder, the more it grows on me. I hope Coast and others are able to put in the time it will take to make it as great as it could be.
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Google Fined in France Because Google Maps is Free
Feb 2nd
A Paris court has ordered Google France and parent company Google Inc. to pay €500,000 ($660,000) in damages, after a two year court battle with French mapping company Bottin Cartographes over their unfair competition complaint.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
French Court Fines Google $660,000 Because Google Maps Is Free
Feb 1st
Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant position in mapping by making Google Maps free. According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google…
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