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I don't think Google is in the wrong here: If you have a route between two points 'white dots' appear in the route, then you can drag and drop those around to

by Zyst 11y ago

I don't think Google is in the wrong here: If you have a route between two points 'white dots' appear in the route, then you can drag and drop those around to manually change the route, to share the URL you can either copy the url at the top bar or just click the 'share' option inside the hamburger menu, which gives you a minified link. In the end, although it's an inferior(?) implementation, Google allows you to do the exact same thing. I think the ToS call mentioned is essentially appropriate. Although it is a bit of a dick move, but in the end it is their api.

pmontra 11y ago
It's a vastly inferior implementation. Despite what the screenshot in the post hints to, the actual implementation only lets users connect the pins by straight lines. It doesn't follow roads and it doesn't do navigation. The reason for that is explained in the FAQ. So it's more or less what anybody would do on day 2 of learning the Google Maps API, plus the save routes (cough...) thing. With that I don't intend to show disrespect for the author, because it has been going on for 10 years with people using it. Much better than anything I built for myself. I'm surprised that Google is going after him. If that "re-implements or duplicates" anything that Google does then almost everybody should receive a letter like that. My guess is that the usage counter for this site eventually reached some limit (10 years for that), a program noticed and the legal department sent a semi automatic mail without an assessment of the service. Still it's probably in their right to do so and it's another reason to use Open Street Map to build this kind of services. Example: http://cycle.travel/ http://cycle.travel/ which does real routing. Furthermore OSM has many offroad tracks and it could make happy the kind of people using routebuilder.

by Zyst 11y ago

pmontra 11y ago

It's a vastly inferior implementation. Despite what the screenshot in the post hints to, the actual implementation only lets users connect the pins by straight lines. It doesn't follow roads and it doesn't do navigation. The reason for that is explained in the FAQ. So it's more or less what anybody would do on day 2 of learning the Google Maps API, plus the save routes (cough...) thing. With that I don't intend to show disrespect for the author, because it has been going on for 10 years with people using it. Much better than anything I built for myself. I'm surprised that Google is going after him. If that "re-implements or duplicates" anything that Google does then almost everybody should receive a letter like that. My guess is that the usage counter for this site eventually reached some limit (10 years for that), a program noticed and the legal department sent a semi automatic mail without an assessment of the service. Still it's probably in their right to do so and it's another reason to use Open Street Map to build this kind of services. Example: http://cycle.travel/ http://cycle.travel/ which does real routing. Furthermore OSM has many offroad tracks and it could make happy the kind of people using routebuilder.