
Google Maps: Bird Mode - tosh
https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569
======
supernintendo
Fun story. There's something to be said about the importance of naming. Google
Maps likely set UX precedents for a lot of other map software to come, for
better and worse. Had Google went with "Bird Mode" (and not trademarked the
phrase) we would have probably seen it propagate throughout other map apps and
the Internet at large.

To this day, I still see the floppy disk used to represent "save" even though
we haven't used floppy disks for decades now. It's not uncommon to see it used
in mobile apps, especially the less UX-obsessed ones you might find on the
Android Play Store.

The next time you assign a name or symbol to something, give it some thought.
You never know how others will use it.

~~~
Stratoscope
The floppy disk icon is scheduled for deletion the same year that we stop
dialing our phones.

~~~
Asooka
Right after we stop using "dashboard", eh. I doubt anyone here (me included)
has ever seen a real dashboard.

~~~
taneq
The instrument panel in front of the driver in a car is still a 'real'
dashboard.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Not in the 'original' sense of the word, which was the point: status webpages
are _twice_ removed from the original meaning.

------
ridiculous_fish
Steve Jobs on how Apple got its name:

"And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I
threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more
interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And
it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple."

~~~
ekianjo
The added benefit is that at the time you end up appearing very early in the
phone books if you company name starts with A. Example: Atari, Amiga... Amiga
was also chosen, if I remember correctly, also because it made it appear
before Atari (eternal rivals...).

~~~
franga2000
ASUS has a similar origin. They were supposed to be called Pegasus, but they
cut off the first 3 letters to be the first on alphabetical lists (I guess
they didn't notice Acer's existence).

~~~
detaro
ASUS was founded by Acer employees, so they probably were aware of Acer :D

------
js2
> We spend the next few days freaking out. We knew the feature was going to be
> huge, and now it had this name that everyone on both sides of the Satellite-
> vs-Aerial-Photography war agreed was silly and horrible. But it was
> _decided_.

Or maybe Sergey did that on purpose to force the teams to make a decision,
"don't make me pull this car over" like.

~~~
wnevets
That's what I think happened, pick what you want or you're getting bird mode.

------
timdorr
Interestingly, Bing Maps uses the technically accurate "Aerial" term:
[https://www.bing.com/maps](https://www.bing.com/maps)

~~~
deanCommie
This reminds me,

Is anyone else remembering when Bing Maps was REALLY good? It had a 45 degree
view of cities that looked insanely good, like Sim City. When you zoomed in
too close, it switched to aerial imagery.

And it was all buttery smooth. What happened to that product?

~~~
black-tea
Yeah, that was great.

Bing also allowed OpenStreetMap to use its aerial imagery for tracing. This
helped OSM a lot!

Google, on the other hand, asks users to help them with their proprietary data
with no compensation.

~~~
rmc
Before Bing, Yahoo allowed OSM to trace.

~~~
Piskvorrr
And others followed suit later, e.g. DigitalGlobe

------
KKKKkkkk1
_Now, these exec reviews were Larry and Sergey’s favorite place to experiment
with crazy meeting ideas (kind of fun, actually). I had attended one review
where one founder spent the entire meeting on an elliptical machine. Their new
experiment was a huge countdown clock._

If your manager brings fun gadgets into your meetings to keep him/herself
entertained, your work might not be important to the company.

~~~
ma2rten
Or it could be that you work at a startup where the founders are playful,
willing to experiment and don't take themselves too seriously. Google did a
lot of things differently than other companies.

Larry and Sergey were extremely invested in Google. I don't think that at this
point there was a single employee at Google whose work was not important for
them. Larry personally signed off on every single hire. And as you can see in
this story they got involved in details like what the text on a button is.

~~~
danpalmer
Yep. Meetings are hard to get right. Experimentation with meeting formats can
be very valuable.

We tend to try a new meeting format for retrospectives every few times,
because different formats raise different sorts of issues, some go deep, some
go wide, variety ensures that the meetings don’t get boring over time and that
we cover as much as possible.

We do similar with brainstorming for new projects too. Some brainstorming
methods are very design focused or tech focused or user focused, etc.
Different types have different results.

------
ufmace
I think I saw it in an Dilbert or something, but that reminds me of the
Dinosaur Strategy. It involves just ignoring any stupid directives that
management puts out, hoping that by the time anybody notices that you haven't
actually done it, they will have forgotten about it or left.

~~~
matt4077
That seems to go well with the general Dilbert philosophy of „everyone but me
is stupid“.

------
gmac
The title reminds me of an arguably-even-closer-to-bird mode I rigged up for a
fun conference exhibit at UCL years ago, using the Google Earth browser plug-
in and a Kinect (linked via Processing and Websockets). We called it Pigeon
Sim.

Video: [https://vimeo.com/41552761](https://vimeo.com/41552761)

Code: [https://github.com/jawj/pigeonsim](https://github.com/jawj/pigeonsim)

~~~
sjg
Ahh those were the days, gmac. We rolled that thing out for years afterwards,
this was truly "Bird Mode" \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ye9dfeu7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ye9dfeu7c)

------
Waterluvian
As a hardcore GIS person it drives me a little wild watching people of other
domains misname things like aerial vs. satellite, photography vs. imagery,
etc. Even moreso is when people of other domains re-write the wheel rather
than learn some GIS (like stuff I see often in Mobile robot
perception/mapping).

The best way I can describe it is that feeling when kids on the playground are
speaking like experts about a videogame you knew about years before anyone.
You should be excited they're into stuff you're into, but you just wished
they'd give a little credit. :)

~~~
petre
I also work with GIS data. Robot perception/mapping is still useful because it
accounts for changes in the environment, like a moved furniture piece. Even
for GIS, you need fresh aerial photos to do feature detection, don't you? The
UN has GIS analysts working around the clck to supply fresh mapping data for
military missions.

~~~
Waterluvian
Those are pretty unrelated.

I'm talking about things like not properly maintaining a singular Cartesian
projection across a mapped space, so it becomes impossible to reproject
related data. So people end up having to manually adjust all the related data
after a remapping session.

------
drewda
For more stories like this, I highly recommend "Never Lost Again" by Bill
Kilday: [https://www.powells.com/book/never-lost-again-the-google-
map...](https://www.powells.com/book/never-lost-again-the-google-mapping-
revolution-that-sparked-new-industries-augmented-our-
reality-9780062673046/1-0)

Kilday was a PM and marketing manager at Keyhole, the startup whose product
was renamed Google Earth after being acquired.

His book includes stories and details on Google Earth, Google Maps, the huge
amounts of $$$$$, and some of the personalities and politics involved
(including Bret Taylor, author of the OP tweet thread).

------
ma2rten
I feel like they were taking themselves too seriously. The company is named
after a spelling mistake. I don't think "Bird Mode" would have been too silly.

------
loose11
>> It turns out, when you write the code, you have a fair amount of power.

Best quote, and the same thing what I think all day long.

~~~
ecpottinger
I had to laugh. All these execs taking the name so serious during the meeting,
yet afterwards none raised a fuss because you used a different name.

What that tells me, the name was never that important to them, it was just an
meeting to show how important they were to each other - yet in real life their
poses meant NOTHING.

~~~
ars
It could also mean exactly the opposite of that: that they didn't take it
seriously and just had fun naming it, but didn't really care.

------
userbinator
I would've just gone with "Photograph", given that the other two types shown
are "Default" and "Terrain".

(As the old saying goes, naming things is hard, and I've personally
experienced a lot of bikeshed over it...)

------
samspenc
Kinda wish they'd gone with "bird mode". In addition to being cool, it looks
like it would have been more accurate as well :)

~~~
bowmessage
true, because the photos were taken by birds

~~~
carlob
ever heard of the phrase bird's-eye view?

~~~
wilg
Yea but if you can make a bird analogy why not a satellite analogy?

~~~
Rebelgecko
Bird is a slangy term for satellite, so it actually fits pretty well with the
Keyhole acquisition

~~~
wilg
Oh I've never heard of that!

------
Qub3d
As always, here's the thread for people that dislike the twitter format:
[https://threader.app/thread/1099370126678253569](https://threader.app/thread/1099370126678253569)

------
xbryanx
It should have been called Bird Mode, because all the images are obviously
taken with birds: [https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/the-
history](https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/the-history)

~~~
mikeash
The internet is truly an amazing place.

------
dstola
Perfect example of "its easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" if the
execs remembered the meeting and did't like the naming, and also meshes
extremely well with "It turns out, when you write the code, you have a fair
amount of power"

------
an4rchy
Why not "Aerial" mode?

Edit: Looks like another reply correctly pointed that Bing uses this.

------
aboutruby
Apple Maps, OpenMapTiles, and Mapbox calls it Satellite. Bing Maps calls it
Aerial.

Maybe heavily influenced by Google Maps.

------
metaphor
> _[Larry and Sergey 's] new experiment was a huge countdown clock. The rule
> was: the review had to end on time. ... And literally no exec noticed or
> remembered our review._

I suppose when you're Larry and Sergey, toying with bikeshed product managers
can be fun _and_ not actually waste a crap ton of time.

------
kkarpkkarp
Side note: on Twitter, you need to place each paragraph of your essay in a
separate post, paying attention to the number of signs.

And people are complaining that the new editor in WordPress (Gutenberg) is bad
:)

------
slack3r
Or the other paranoid conspiracy theory interpretation is that the CIA wanted
to call it Bird mode to avoid freaking out people. See
[https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-
keyhole/](https://pando.com/2015/07/01/cia-foia-google-keyhole/)

~~~
propogandist
Your comment makes little sense.

The article you linked is from a FOIA request. CIA's In-Q-Tel was an investor
in the Keyhole product, and that Google has continued to receive excluive
contracts for Google Maps.

The tweets note that Sergy proposed the name Bird mode, not the CIA, although
the article suggests he (and Google) was closely working with CIA and US
intelligence agencies. CIA also denied providing details on why/how they solid
the In-Q-Tel funded product to Google.

Which is all to say, you should question what Google's doing with Maps and the
massive amount of data its mining every moment its on, rather than passing off
baseless statements as conspiracy theories.

------
agumonkey
What does `We pocket vetoed the decision ` mean ?

~~~
p4lindromica
A pocket veto is when the President vetos a bill by not signing it and letting
it expire.

------
mncharity
A few years later, perhaps it would have been Drone mode?

When I saw the title, I thought a flying UI, like Google Earth VR has[1], had
come to Google Maps.

[1] A random flight to street view transition:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nulHk7Z3mI&t=96](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nulHk7Z3mI&t=96)

------
puzzle
Speaking of the founders' involvement, I seem to remember that, almost ten
years ago, picking up to ten "best ever" places among your Google Hotpot
ratings was Sergey's idea. I don't think that lasted more than a year. Hotpot
itself was folded back into Maps reviews.

------
n0pe_p0pe
Funny enough, Bird Mode would probably be the most accurate name for the
service as both satellites and planes are referred to as "birds"

------
Theodores
It would have been more fun to name it after a three letter agency, the ones
with Hubble Space Telescopes that point down instead of up.

~~~
sverige
In fact, the Keyhole satellites those agencies used were state-of-the-art at
one time. And "Google" is a much less scary name than "NSA Surveillance Tool,"
though there's little practical difference between the two in terms of the
amount of data they scoop up on each of us. Of course, only one requires a
court order (at least theoretically) to use it against you.

~~~
noir_lord
Says a lot I had to wonder which required the court order and then remembered
since I’m not a US citizen it’s a moot point.

------
tardismechanic
L&S come off as the biggest jokers ever who lucked into a multi-billion dollar
empire. Sigh.

------
ralusek
This would have opened them up to all sorts of litigation nightmares generally
classified under Bird Law, a sector in which Google is notoriously weak.

Why didn't they just call it Photo, or Image, or Detail?

~~~
arrrg
Those are horrible options, worse than all three alternatives discussed (bird,
aerial, satellite).

Detail: That’s not specific enough. It could refer to everything and anything.

Image and Photo: People do not really use these words to refer to aerial and
satellite photography. People might think it’s some kind of photo-mode
(referring to actual photos that are somehow placed on the map).

Obviously you would have to test this to be really sure that someone has a
problem with these – but to me their problematic nature seems quite obvious.

Realistically it would, however, not really be realistic to test (all) changes
like these … so you have to trust me that your intuition in this case is
horrible.

I mean, even if you test it the effect of anything you suggested would
probably be small – but to me choices like those are what make software really
and truly awful.

~~~
ralusek
[https://youtu.be/3bImBBTaPDY](https://youtu.be/3bImBBTaPDY)

------
based2
\+ Raster:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics#Geographic_inf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics#Geographic_information_systems)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthophoto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthophoto)

