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OpenStreetMap is awesome but not really a map service, it hosts the open data and the map editor/wiki. You can use their map to a certain extend but if there wa

OpenStreetMap is awesome but not really a map service, it hosts the open data and the map editor/wiki. You can use their map to a certain extend but if there was a huge spike in traffic, their site would fall. If you want a good service based on OSM with directions and more, you have to use something else such as mapquest which is US based or host it yourself.

buro9 13y ago
Or MapBox - http://www.mapbox.com/ http://www.mapbox.com/ Though, MapBox is extremely expensive if you require SSL support (because your site is on SSL) and you are a startup. You can't even solve it yourself by performing the SSL termination and proxying the requests as that is prohibited in their T&Cs. But at least they exist and offer a really beautiful map style based on the OSM data. Still US based though, but they also provide TileMill so you can host your own (though not using their very good Streets styling).
- freyfogle 13y ago
  Another option for map tiles is http://www.thunderforest.com http://www.thunderforest.com On the data side there's the recently launched http://opencagedata.com http://opencagedata.com (disclosure, I'm the founder). The point is with OSM there's more than one way to do it. You can dive in, get your hands dirty and do it all yourself, or work with a rapidly growing ecosystem of service providers who do the work for you at a cost. With private geodata / map providers, be they internet giants like Goog or national mapping agencies there is their way or ... their way.
  - buro9 13y ago
    My biggest use-case for maps on web-sites is to simply communicate a location. Not to navigate by car, by bike, by foot. Not to show advertiser bubbles, or utilities. Just a clear communication of "The point in question is in this neighbourhood, at that point.". For me, that's the beauty in MapBox's Streets style... it does that one thing really well. Retaining enough countryside detail to make location recognition very good, and it works brilliantly in a city. Yet at the same time it's neutral enough to look great no matter how bad the design of the web-site it appears on. I definitely prefer non-US, and non-giant mapping providers, but there's a lot to be said for cartographers who design maps to be useful generically for location recognition rather than anything else. I strongly feel that this is what Google Maps got so right, and is also why MapBox will do very well. More than the tech, design matters.
    - andyking 13y ago
      I agree with this, which is why the new Google Maps rubs me up the wrong way. I don't like how it changes the emphasis of different streets and roads depending on what you've searched for. A major road is a major road, and shouldn't turn into a minor road just because the restaurant you clicked on isn't on it. We look at a map of our town or city, and the main roads in and out are the spines - everything is off one of them. If you turn those white, and remove the emphasis, the map becomes far less readable.
  - shubb 13y ago
    Props for opencagedata.com! It's fairly easy (days work) to set up a Geoserver web map server to provide the data you need as a Web Map Service. You could use parent's data. People should note the GetFeatureInfo interface that WMS provides for asking about the entities in a particular part of the map - click a house, yield the address and owner as XML (if you have that data). Then you'd use openlayers to implement the web map on your site. A 'roll your own' solution like this is only a good idea if you want to do something special, but an off the shelf solution constrains what you believe you can do. Imagine if every start-up was doing their site in wordpress.
    - freyfogle 13y ago
      Thanks, we went live literally just a few days ago, so any and all feedback on our site or proposition would be very helpful.
- belorn 13y ago
  How is cloudmade (http://cloudmade.com/ http://cloudmade.com/) compared to mapbox? I often use their website for making directions (http://maps.cloudmade.com/ http://maps.cloudmade.com/) but never their API.
  - buro9 13y ago
    I use CloudMade at the moment, and it's nice. I personally find that the users prefer the CloudMade API in terms of the quality of results that come back from geolocation searches. The maps work fine, and the site could do with an update... but where CloudMade struggles is the design of the maps. At certain zoom levels (quite zoomed in) and within particularly dense areas (centre of Paris and London) they're just ugly. Which would be fine were it not for the fact that where there is high-density there is also a lot of users. Both CloudMade and MapBox allow you to run custom styles... but unless you are a designer and/or cartographer who knows what you're doing, you're likely to make a hash of it. Getting a good design for maps is very very hard, making something ugly is shockingly easy. Neither CloudMade or MapBox can prevent this, but at least MapBox's default is really quite beautiful.
- riquito 13y ago
  On Firefox linux, both 21 and aurora, their "Start now" example doesn't work: when I zoom all the tiles requests end up in "400 bad request". Chromium works. Not really satisfying
XorNot 13y ago
The advantage of OSM is that ability to host if offline. I used OsmAnd+ on my droidphone for offline maps and navigation, and it expertly got me through Europe great. Google Maps for mobile devices fundamentally fails because mobile data coverage is far from ubiquitous or reliable for something that important.
- dagw 13y ago
  Google Maps on Android at least allows downloading maps for offline use. I've used it lots of time when traveling and it works great. The only slight downside is there is a limit to how big a single downloaded map can be. So if you want to download all of Europe you have download it as a whole bunch of smaller maps and switch between them rather than a single big map, but realistically I've never run into problems with the size limitation
  - just_testing 13y ago
    Yeah, but the offline maps do not work in Brazil due to licensing restrictions. So OSM has an advantage there.
    - justincormack 13y ago
      Or in the UK. Belgium is OK.
  - dataminer 13y ago
    Another limitation of Google Maps is, it does not provide offline navigation which becomes very important in places where you don't have mobile data coverage.
    - corresation 13y ago
      This is a seldom known fact that catches people out because most assume that if you have the map locally, it will help you traverse it locally. My personal story on this is going across the border to see an NFL game in Detroit last year, turning off data because of the usurious rates Canadian carriers charge for roaming. When leaving I couldn't navigate at all -- despite the relevant map being available -- so I had to turn data on for a couple of seconds just for Google to get the route. $20 for 3MB of data. Someone relying upon it when they're out of cellular range would be in a much worse situation.
rmc 13y ago
OpenStreetMap provides that data, which allows you to build any map service you want. Getting the raw data is one of the hardest parts.

buro9 13y ago

Or MapBox - http://www.mapbox.com/ http://www.mapbox.com/ Though, MapBox is extremely expensive if you require SSL support (because your site is on SSL) and you are a startup. You can't even solve it yourself by performing the SSL termination and proxying the requests as that is prohibited in their T&Cs. But at least they exist and offer a really beautiful map style based on the OSM data. Still US based though, but they also provide TileMill so you can host your own (though not using their very good Streets styling).

freyfogle 13y ago
Another option for map tiles is http://www.thunderforest.com http://www.thunderforest.com On the data side there's the recently launched http://opencagedata.com http://opencagedata.com (disclosure, I'm the founder). The point is with OSM there's more than one way to do it. You can dive in, get your hands dirty and do it all yourself, or work with a rapidly growing ecosystem of service providers who do the work for you at a cost. With private geodata / map providers, be they internet giants like Goog or national mapping agencies there is their way or ... their way.
- buro9 13y ago
  My biggest use-case for maps on web-sites is to simply communicate a location. Not to navigate by car, by bike, by foot. Not to show advertiser bubbles, or utilities. Just a clear communication of "The point in question is in this neighbourhood, at that point.". For me, that's the beauty in MapBox's Streets style... it does that one thing really well. Retaining enough countryside detail to make location recognition very good, and it works brilliantly in a city. Yet at the same time it's neutral enough to look great no matter how bad the design of the web-site it appears on. I definitely prefer non-US, and non-giant mapping providers, but there's a lot to be said for cartographers who design maps to be useful generically for location recognition rather than anything else. I strongly feel that this is what Google Maps got so right, and is also why MapBox will do very well. More than the tech, design matters.
  - andyking 13y ago
    I agree with this, which is why the new Google Maps rubs me up the wrong way. I don't like how it changes the emphasis of different streets and roads depending on what you've searched for. A major road is a major road, and shouldn't turn into a minor road just because the restaurant you clicked on isn't on it. We look at a map of our town or city, and the main roads in and out are the spines - everything is off one of them. If you turn those white, and remove the emphasis, the map becomes far less readable.
- shubb 13y ago
  Props for opencagedata.com! It's fairly easy (days work) to set up a Geoserver web map server to provide the data you need as a Web Map Service. You could use parent's data. People should note the GetFeatureInfo interface that WMS provides for asking about the entities in a particular part of the map - click a house, yield the address and owner as XML (if you have that data). Then you'd use openlayers to implement the web map on your site. A 'roll your own' solution like this is only a good idea if you want to do something special, but an off the shelf solution constrains what you believe you can do. Imagine if every start-up was doing their site in wordpress.
  - freyfogle 13y ago
    Thanks, we went live literally just a few days ago, so any and all feedback on our site or proposition would be very helpful.
belorn 13y ago
How is cloudmade (http://cloudmade.com/ http://cloudmade.com/) compared to mapbox? I often use their website for making directions (http://maps.cloudmade.com/ http://maps.cloudmade.com/) but never their API.
- buro9 13y ago
  I use CloudMade at the moment, and it's nice. I personally find that the users prefer the CloudMade API in terms of the quality of results that come back from geolocation searches. The maps work fine, and the site could do with an update... but where CloudMade struggles is the design of the maps. At certain zoom levels (quite zoomed in) and within particularly dense areas (centre of Paris and London) they're just ugly. Which would be fine were it not for the fact that where there is high-density there is also a lot of users. Both CloudMade and MapBox allow you to run custom styles... but unless you are a designer and/or cartographer who knows what you're doing, you're likely to make a hash of it. Getting a good design for maps is very very hard, making something ugly is shockingly easy. Neither CloudMade or MapBox can prevent this, but at least MapBox's default is really quite beautiful.
riquito 13y ago
On Firefox linux, both 21 and aurora, their "Start now" example doesn't work: when I zoom all the tiles requests end up in "400 bad request". Chromium works. Not really satisfying

XorNot 13y ago

The advantage of OSM is that ability to host if offline. I used OsmAnd+ on my droidphone for offline maps and navigation, and it expertly got me through Europe great. Google Maps for mobile devices fundamentally fails because mobile data coverage is far from ubiquitous or reliable for something that important.

dagw 13y ago
Google Maps on Android at least allows downloading maps for offline use. I've used it lots of time when traveling and it works great. The only slight downside is there is a limit to how big a single downloaded map can be. So if you want to download all of Europe you have download it as a whole bunch of smaller maps and switch between them rather than a single big map, but realistically I've never run into problems with the size limitation
- just_testing 13y ago
  Yeah, but the offline maps do not work in Brazil due to licensing restrictions. So OSM has an advantage there.
  - justincormack 13y ago
    Or in the UK. Belgium is OK.
- dataminer 13y ago
  Another limitation of Google Maps is, it does not provide offline navigation which becomes very important in places where you don't have mobile data coverage.
  - corresation 13y ago
    This is a seldom known fact that catches people out because most assume that if you have the map locally, it will help you traverse it locally. My personal story on this is going across the border to see an NFL game in Detroit last year, turning off data because of the usurious rates Canadian carriers charge for roaming. When leaving I couldn't navigate at all -- despite the relevant map being available -- so I had to turn data on for a couple of seconds just for Google to get the route. $20 for 3MB of data. Someone relying upon it when they're out of cellular range would be in a much worse situation.

rmc 13y ago

OpenStreetMap provides that data, which allows you to build any map service you want. Getting the raw data is one of the hardest parts.