
The Wikipedia layer has been removed from Google Maps - ak217
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/toaewYdz0kg
======
Afforess
Google doesn't get "it" anymore. People used their products because they were
free and provided tons more functionality over the "other" competition
(mapquest/yahoo/askjeeves).

If they aren't providing the features that differentiates their services
anymore, people will leave them. Just because Google's stuff is free doesn't
mean I have to put up with their constant anti-user focus. In fact, that
Google products are mostly free makes it that much easier for me to pack up
and leave.

Fuck off Google.

~~~
graublau
This over a map layer? The quality, breadth and accessibility of the data
Google maps provides is the reason I keep using it. What else is there? Apple
Maps?

~~~
officemonkey
Yes. Or MapQuest.

Hey, this is the internet. We all switched from AltaVista to Google and from
MapQuest to Google Maps, and from Yahoo mail to Gmail. If Google sucks, vote
with your feet.

It's really no harder than changing a bookmark.

~~~
glesica
When changing mail providers (I chose Fastmail) I made sure to pick a service
that would let me use my own domain. I now "own" my email address, so in the
future switching will be even easier. I suggest others do the same.

~~~
mathgladiator
This is great for the few like us that enjoy having a personal domain, but
most people don't which is very unfortunate. It's very-painful for most people
to migrate email providers.

~~~
glesica
I wonder if there's a business opportunity there: make it easy to own a
personal domain name and use it with various other services. So instead of
having to monkey with MX records for mail, you just say "I'm using provider X
and here is my account info.". If distributed social networks ever go anywhere
(a dubious proposition, I'll admit) then automatic configuration/hosting could
be bundled, with all the necessary configuration and DNS records done for the
user.

Of course this magical company could go bust, but even if it did, the users
would technically be able to migrate to one or more other providers without
losing anything, including URLs.

~~~
icebraining
The problem is that the popular free providers don't offer domain hosting, and
the paid ones that do (e.g., Google Apps, FastMail) already handle that for
you, if you let them.

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pretzel
I've been playing around with a wikipedia layer on Google Maps -
[http://retred.org](http://retred.org) \- code here:
[https://github.com/twistedvisions/anaximander](https://github.com/twistedvisions/anaximander).
It's just a couple weekends play at the moment, but the cool thing about it is
the date slider at the top - you can see what was going on in a certain area
at a certain time.

It's a bit shit at the moment (and only has 10% of dbpedia's births, deaths,
city foundations and battles at the moment - things with both a time and a
place) , but have a play and try not to break my AWS micro instance!

~~~
mbrenig
V interesting. I've been looking at this too. There were a few deficiencies in
the google implementation that bugged me. (1) You have to click on icons to
read the info, I think the wikipedia layer should be browsable and ideally
include photos. (2) No way to filter to certain articles (e.g. WWII battles)
and (3) No date filter - as you've spotted. Tweet me @mbrenig if you want to
talk more.

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wldlyinaccurate
I used the Wikipedia layer extensively during a road trip around Scotland. It
was a great way to find nearby places of interest - I daresay the trip
wouldn't have been anywhere as interesting without it. More recently I was in
France, hoping to do the same thing. To say I was disappointed to find the
feature had been removed is a massive understatement.

I don't really understand how Google gets away with this sort of thing, I
thought it was Software 101 to never remove features. It's _sort-of_
understandable if the feature has very few users, but it sounds like this one
is used by quite a lot of people.

~~~
wpietri
Well, that Software 101 thing applies to software you sell to customers. The
theory is that you should keep doing the thing that people pay you money for.

However, with Google, we aren't the customers, we're the product. So here the
equivalent question is, "Does the Wikipedia layer help the advertisers make
sales?"

~~~
jgreen10
Does Google losing users help advertisers make sales?

~~~
wpietri
It could well. For example, getting rid of the Wikipedia layer might make
people more likely to click on displayed ads. So the people who leave Google
because of the change might have clicked many fewer ads than will now be
clicked by those people now more focused on the important thing. That is,
giving Google money.

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obilgic
At Google's scale, there will always be some people using that niche feature,
but that does not mean that it is a good fit for the product.

~~~
eCa
Yes. But when you used to have a company culture that looked favourably on
niche features, and you later start to remove niche feature after niche
feature after niche feature, that you start make a lot of people a little
disappointed in you.

In other words:

Lets say you remove 100 "niche features".

You have 100,000 users.

Every niche features was used by 0.05% of your users.

Now you have upset 100000 * 0.0005 * 100 = 5000 or 5% of what is likely among
your most vocal users.

~~~
RobAtticus
This assumes the set of upset users for each feature is disjoint. Not sure it
makes a difference to your larger point, but I have a feeling that there would
be overlap.

~~~
wpietri
Niche features tend to be disjoint, in that they're mainly defined by use case
and audience. If a bunch of little things are used by one audience, that is
often treated as just one feature, even when they would be considered separate
features if they were for different audiences. If something is used across
audiences, the feature generally isn't thought of as niche.

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tomrod
This seems pretty arbitrary. I'm sure there was a business case discussed, but
between this, Reader being discontinued, and the new mega-application in
Android for OS updates, I sometimes wonder what direction Google is heading in
the near future. 2006-2011ish seemed like such a great era of Google-led
innovation (my dates are probably off or rose-colored -- your call).

~~~
barryhunter
Why does there need to be a business case?

Its quite probable the engineer that built the layer has left (either Google
altogether, or just to another team).

As its aged its started misbehaving, and nobody left is interested enough to
figure how to fix it. Ultimately its easier just to ditch it than to maintain.

euthanasia rather than murder.

~~~
tomrod
Sounds like a good case to ensure documenting of codebase is expected. Is
bitrot a normal thing in firms such that somewhat large projects are abandoned
because of poorly documented code?

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rwmj
Luckily OsmAnd+ (cost £5, there's a free version) is brilliant, and having all
of the maps loaded into the phone at once is so much better than having to
download bits of maps as you go along. It navigated me around Japan
faultlessly last January.

~~~
zrgiu_
Almost all Osm apps on Android I've tried freeze completely when you zoom out
to more than 1/4 Tokyo level. Is this any better ?

Edit: just downloaded the full version, and I can confirm it's a lot better
than every other Osm apps I've tried. I'm using a Galaxy S4 by the way

~~~
toni
I just tried to see if this bug exists in OsmAnd+ but couldn't reproduce it.
In general, it is a tight and stable app. Give it a try. There is a free
version which is as good as the paid one.

Edit - here is their git repository:
[https://code.google.com/p/osmand/](https://code.google.com/p/osmand/)

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na85
You know, Google really did a great job with the gmail UI. Truly it's awesome.

But I'm starting to think it was a fluke, because holy fuck, browsing their
"forums" is so painful.

~~~
josh2600
Interesting.

Could you please tell me what you like about it? I have very mixed feelings
leaning towards unpleasantness (where the hell is CC and why does it take more
than one click?).

~~~
na85
What I like about google forums? Almost nothing.

I don't know what CC is.

edit: OH, I get it

I like Gmail because of the threaded view. It's old hat nowadays but the fact
remains that the threaded view is quite simply leagues better than old-school
email inbox views.

I'm not saying it can't be improved, but it's a very good ux. I even like the
new compose, once I got used to it.

As for CC... why do you need it? Just add the address to the "To:" field. The
result is the same. The only time you need to put it in a different field is
for BCCs, and quite frankly I imagine most don't use that feature.

~~~
simoncion
Pine has had conversation threading since 2002. Mutt has had conversation
threading since at least 2003.

I'm just saying, the original Gmail UI guys were inspired by _good_ email
clients. :)

~~~
na85
You mean Pine, the hideous ncurses client that stopped being developed in
2005?

~~~
nilved
Yes

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jokoon
I giess this will really make devs understand that one day, they might see a
world without google or any search engine, and they will start to adapt and
create a more decentralized internet.

I'm not talking about a come back to the stone age, but I'm sure there are
tons of opportunities to do networking with decentralized apps so that users
can actually own their data to make it more relevant. Today the internet is
completely ruled by big companies, and users can't really decide how the
internet should view them.

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wazoox
The new Maps is an utter failure end to end, IMO. It's much slower than the
previous version (both the web and android app), it takes ages to load; the
various tools (traffic, etc) are much less practical and easy to use; on the
mobile version, it can't cache large areas anymore (complete PITA), and anyway
there isn't any way to manage the cache; and the guidance on the android
version doesn't work at all anymore, it systematically displays the map on a
wrong orientation and gives ridiculous indications; the last couple of times
it sent me on the wrong way repeatedly to a point I simply stopped using it at
all.

Furthermore I failed to see any significant improvement from the rewrite. Only
annoyances.

~~~
jghrng
Don't forget the missing zoom buttons that make it almost impossible to use
the app with one hand only...

~~~
jsnell
Double-tap to zoom in.

Double-tap + drag up to zoom in, double-tap + drag down to zoom out.

Both of these have been in maps for a while, and are a lot better for one-
handed use than those Android 1.5-era buttons ever were.

~~~
studentrob
How the heck is the average user supposed to figure that out? Not intuitive at
all.

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gmapsmania
This can only be good news for wikmapia.
[http://wikimapia.org/](http://wikimapia.org/)

At one point wikimapia was the most popular map built upon the Google Maps
API. I'm pretty sure it's why Google introduced a wiki layer themselves to
Google Maps.

------
lifeformed
Has anyone else started getting huge performance issues with Google Maps
recently? The new big update is super laggy for me, so I switched it back to
the classic mode. However, that mode keeps freezing up or loads really slowly.
The funny thing is it only happens on Chrome.

~~~
dereferenced
I just built a new computer. Haswell 4770k, 16 gigs of ram, geforce 760.
Google maps desktop performs so bad that I actually use bing maps instead now.
I can't believe how slow it is.

~~~
porpoisemonkey
What OS are you running?

I've found that Linux machines which run OS's with older kernel versions
(CentOS 6.4) seem to have unbearably bad performance - just speculating but I
think it's probably due to a lack of hardware acceleration support in the
video card drivers. The new Maps uses vector-based instead of tile-based
rendering which requires quite a bit more computational power to achieve a
nicer look.

------
sspiff
Another annoying removal is the distance ruler from Labs. I used that thing
all the time.

~~~
nandhp
I still have it, at least on my laptop where I use classic maps.

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teeja
I noticed the WP layer missing (on the public web maps) quite a long time ago.
Very disappointing. (I heard there was a disagreement between WP and Google
that may have precipitated that.) Along with that, I believe that the amount
of information detail on Google's (public web) maps has been dropping
steadily. I've assumed that's because of increased mobile usage necessitating
bandwidth-trimming measures. (No hard examples, based on expectations created
by prior experience.)

Similar things seem to have been happening at OpenStreetMap ... the gradual
fade of a certain kinds of detail. Zoom in on a region and see what kind of
luck you have identifying bodies of water. (Same problem at Google.) I've had
to switch to the MapQuest version for that.

~~~
hnha
Can you give more detail on what you are missing in the osm map and link to
examples? That style is open, unlike.the others.

~~~
teeja
Well, for example compare:

OSM
[http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.3825/-68.5375](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.3825/-68.5375)
(I don't see anything on the St. Lawrence River either...)

Mapquest [http://mapq.st/18F1XnO](http://mapq.st/18F1XnO)

Looking at LARGE bodies of water away from populated regions, I'm seeing very
few labels anywhere.

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chrisro
If you're looking for a replacement, I really love the Roadtrippers tool:
[http://roadtrippers.com](http://roadtrippers.com)

It's not a Wikipedia layer, but their data sets are interesting. There's a lot
more context than the Wikipedia layer because they've organized things into
categories. Their international coverage isn't as good as their US coverage,
though.

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wnevets
Oh look another feature I never used getting dropped but there will tons of
outrage over.

~~~
jotux
I felt the same way when reader was discontinued. "Meh, I never used it and
don't see the big deal." Then google got rid of Latitude, which I used
extensively, and I finally knew what it felt like. Google will arbitrarily
drop something you like and you too will understand the outrage.

~~~
wnevets
I get it, Im expecting them to drop google voice any day now and I'm going to
be pissed.

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studentrob
WHY? "I think you will not get an answer to that question"

I didn't even know about this layer, but this has tipped the scale for me.

After reader disappearing, trying to change Maps in a way I don't like,
pushing G+ everywhere and merging separate products, all the NSA lies, and
changing GMail compose, I look forward to supporting non-Google efforts. /rant

