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A shame that all of this data is collected "free" for Google, then people are made to pay to access it for their apps in the Maps API.
by flyt 15y ago
A shame that all of this data is collected "free" for Google, then people are made to pay to access it for their apps in the Maps API.
- ch0wn 15y agoThe normal user will still be able to use them for free. Google, however, can't use the uploaded data for free, but has to invest quite massively in order to prepare it for consumption.
- cloudwalking 15y agoOnly sites that pay are sites with many thousands of requests per day. They're more paying for the infrastructure overhead than data. Would you rather have Google Maps covered in ads, ala Search, or have the top 1% of companies making money from the product pay for it?
- _delirium 15y agoYou can't get even an offline dump for statistical/data-mining purposes, though; it's not only real-time, live use of the data that's restricted. That's why I contribute to OpenStreetMap but don't participate in any of Google Maps's crowdsourcing efforts, because I want the data to be available for bulk download to enable various kinds of analysis and reuse. If Google provided bulk downloads I'd support their service, though, even if the online API required payment, because I do think it's reasonable to charge people who're using Google's infrastructure as basically their webapp backend.
- nextparadigms 15y agoGoogle is providing a hosted service. They are free to host them themselves if they want.
- zobzu 15y agocool, link me to the dump and web interface so i can run my own! /sarcasm (you never known)
- zobzu 15y agoMy thoughs exactly. If I'm contributing such stuff, I'll go with open street maps.
- magicalist 15y agoThere's two sides to this. There's the corporate/public-good argument, where wikipedia is probably the best OSM analog, so it makes sense. But there's also the user generated content argument, where there are plenty of for profit companies that completely depend on content given for free by their users (youtube, reddit, etc), where the users also benefit from having better content on a site they visit and more attention to the content that they post. From that way of looking at things, it makes perfect sense for property owners to want to have their floor plans up on google maps. In any case, I disagree that paying to access the maps API is necessarily bad...any OSM host will also charge over any trivial amount of traffic because none of them have the (free) infrastructure to handle it. I do agree with other posters, though, that there should be Data Liberation Front coverage for things like this and data contributed through map maker, and that it should have been that way for years now.
- aubergene 15y agoImagine a large chain of shop sets aside an employee to upload the floor plans for each of their stores. The company would probably find it beneficial if they could download/make available the result of using the tool, so that if they wished they could also make the floor plan available to other map providers.
- joedev 15y agoThe cost to Google of this effort is far greater than $0.