
Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish - dlikhten
https://plus.google.com/u/0/118383351194421484817/posts/foj5A1fURGt
======
kooshball
I really wish there is a way to show more than just the domain name next to
the title.

>Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish (google.com)

is simply misleading.

~~~
dpcan
Also not on the topic of the article, but...

I wish people would stop blogging on Google plus. Period.

It's the worst reading experience ever on the iPhone - nearly impossible as
the text blurs, and you have to drag the article around to see it all and then
wait for the blur to go away.

~~~
cryptoz
Does the iPhone not open Google Plus posts in the Google Plus app? Or do you
not have it installed? The reason your experience is awful is because Google
doesn't care to make the G+ mobile web experience perfect since their app is
the way to go.

On Android, when I click one of these links it opens the app and the reading
experience is very pleasant. Maybe I've just been spoiled, but I find the
experience to be pretty good.

Edit: Also, I think it's kind of silly that you wish people would stop
publicly posting on Google Plus due to your phone experience being subpar. I
think the problem lies much more with you and your phone than it does with
Google Plus _as a writing platform_.

~~~
chc
Let me get this straight: You think it's more reasonable for Apple to have to
build in special support so requests for webpages on plus.google.com go to the
G+ app instead of Safari than for Google to just make their site work on
mobile platforms like everybody else on the planet?

You are, as the kids say, straight trippin'.

~~~
JohnnyBrown
I've never developed for iOS, but on my iPhone when I go to okcupid.com it
somehow 'redirects' to the okcupid app on my phone. So it seems there is some
capability for this built in that website developers can take advantage of.

~~~
damncabbage
iOS apps can register foobar:// hooks. If a site redirects to a URI with a
custom protocol, it'll wake up the app that's tied to it.

(I'm not sure how they're detecting whether that hook is registered or not,
though.)

~~~
chc
It looks like they basically ask whether you want to use the site or the app
the first time you visit on a device, and if you choose the app, it sends you
to the App Store and sets a localstorage setting that triggers a redirect on
subsequent visits. (Edit: OK, it's a little bit more sophisticated than that.
But I think that's not too far off.)

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jsnell
When those prices were announced, I was really expecting that they were just
for show, and really everybody would end up paying way less than list price.
It's bizarre that this isn't happening. Making a real and profitable business
out of providing a geo API is great. Pricing it out of just about everyone's
range and driving the potential customers away, less so. I can come up with a
lot of theories, but none that is really believable:

1\. So many companies really paying nearly list price that it's worth losing
the other business.

2\. Using different pricing schemes on different customers to figure out what
the pain threshold really is, to maximize profit.

3\. The sales people have a bad set of incentives, and are too strongly
encouraged to try to make sales with low discounts.

4\. ?

------
demetris
A similar story on HN from a couple of weeks ago:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851> – Why (and how) we've switched
away from Google Maps (nestoria.co.uk)

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jroseattle
The most telling part of this experience was the discovery of how good open
source mapping has become lately.

While it's the money that's forcing developers to look for alternative mapping
solutions, it's also unleashing a wave of interest in open source maps. Those
will undoubtedly get better as time passes.

I do believe Google will look back on the decision to start charging for their
map products _at the levels chosen_ as a bad one for themselves, but a great
one for open source.

------
jcampbell1
The maps do not show subway stop locations. That is not good when you are a
NYC real estate company.

~~~
zackola
Rest assured that we will be adding the subway stops and various other awesome
related data sets shortly.

~~~
ubercore
Not to sound like a downer, because I really appreciate open source mapping,
but that's the part where I think the costs, long term, will swing back.

Google maps is deceptively simple, in that the javascript library and tiling
is a relatively solved problem. Google has the best datasets, and the best
large-data know-how in the business, so outsourcing things like an up-to-date
transit location and route database is built into that seemingly large cost.

What if you want to offer transit directions from your location to a rental?

Again, sorry if this sounds like I'm poo-poo'ing your effort; that's not my
intention. I think there's another side to this story, though.

EDIT: Forgot to mention my own personal white whale. Google's geocoder is far
from perfect, but it's the best I've seen. I worked for years with them, and
none of the open source geocoders (or expensive ESRI products) could deal with
addresses like Google's. Geocoding is like web WYSIWYG editors; they all suck,
but some suck less than others. And everyone thinks they can do it better.

~~~
peteretep
> Forgot to mention my own personal white whale. Google's geocoder is far from
> perfect, but it's the best I've seen

Lulz wht? Google's Geocoder is by far the suckiest of any of the ones I
evaluated. I'd highly recommend Bing or Yahoo before Google's geocoder.

~~~
ma2rten
I did a test with different Geocoders (Google, MapQuest, Bing, Yahoo, Nokia).
Google was lightyears ahead of the rest in my test. It was for the
Netherlands, though.

~~~
loupgaroublond
The netherlands is a different beast when it comes to Geocoding since each
postcode only corresponds with around 10 buildings all very close to each
other. Most other systems cover larger delivery areas. My complete amateur
comment is that you need different algorithms for different countries.

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vijayr
Google charging heavily for maps is a good thing, in a way - more alternatives
will come up, which are (hopefully) cheaper, and not locked to one company's
whims

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Roboprog
The take away I got is that Google maps is a very good way to implement a map
tile on your pages if you are a startup, one less thing to worry about, but if
you succeed, be prepared to "optimize" the cost of that portion later. The
per-unit cost is a steep slope, once you start to get volume.

Fair enough. No way would I try to make my own map at the beginning of a
project.

~~~
freyfogle
You don't need to make your own map. MapQuest serves very nice OSM tiles for
free. See how we did it using MapQuest here

[http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-
fr...](http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-from-google-
ma)

Then later if you feel like it you can switch to your own tiles

------
aasarava
Does anyone have any pointers to tutorials on how to get started building OSM
maps? For example, if I have my own "map" of the US (a simple graphic image),
how do I go about connecting that up to state boundaries and plotting lat/long
on it, and then breaking it all up into tiles? I feel like that part of the
puzzle is always missing from blog posts like these (though the post is
helpful for the bigger infrastructure picture.)

~~~
saras
While notaddicted's reply can also be useful to you, I think the part of the
puzzle that you are missing is "georeferencing". From your example, with a
raster (bitmap, image) map of the US: the part where you start connecting that
to lat/lon is georeferencing. Essentially, you want to tie a spatial reference
to your image, so that the raster's state boundaries will correspond to state
boundaries on a "real" map. You can think of it as pinning an image you know
nothing about to a map you do know something about, and then copying the
information from known to unknown.

There are plenty of ways to georeference an image. The easiest would be to use
something like QGIS or GRASS (both opensource GIS software). You will need
existing spatial data to base your (as of now, non-spatial) map on: a
shapefile of the state boundaries would work great.

Once you've wrapped your head around georeferencing and the idea of spatial vs
nonspatial data, you will probably get more out of the mapsfromscratch
tutorial.

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kapitalx
> they might have bad data, and there's very little you can do about it except
> report it and wait

You can actually go to Google MapMaker and modify things yourself. I've fixed
many things to date. <http://www.google.com/mapmaker>

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blhack
Could somebody explain to me how google charges for maps? I'm using it for
<http://lanmarks.com/> \-- and it's not like I'm throwing an API key at them
with the javascript include...

~~~
cullenking
Start using an API key - you can then use their API console to track your
usage, and you'll actually get notifications of overages, impending shutoff
etc. Much better than flying blind.

------
pud
Fortunately Google Maps' _geocoding_ API limits still appear to be based on IP
address. So if you do your API requests via client-side AJAX, you should be
fine. That's because it's unlikely any individual user will make more than
25,000 requests in a day.

~~~
tmcw
Almost: unfortunately via the terms, you need to display the geocoding results
on a Google Map.

> Note: the Geocoding API may only be used in conjunction with a Google map;
> geocoding results without displaying them on a map is prohibited.

from: <http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/>

So, though the limit is technically lower, it's practically and legally quite
the same.

------
kuahyeow
It's a very overview of the current open source map technologies out there.
People may be talking a lot about the price, but my feeling is that the next
batch of map servers etc are catering to a major set of folks who wish to
diverge from the stock standard Google Maps look and functionality.

The technology is simplifying the whole process of generating and rendering
maps quite a bit - comes with it's trade-offs of course. For those requiring a
step or two above a simple basic map yet wish to have more customization over
what's in the map tile, it's perfect - processing times are getting less, and
the technology is becoming less arcane to understand

------
ma2rten
This might just be a matter of taste or just what I am used to, but I have yet
to see another online map, that looks as good as Google Maps. Do others have a
different option about this?

Btw, when Google announced it's ridiculous new pricing scheme for Google Maps,
I though maybe they actually just wanted to force people to become Google Maps
Premier costumers. I mean, no way they really except people to pay that much.
So I am really curious if their Premier program is actually less expensive.
Did you actually contact Google Sales about it?

------
ajtaylor
Thanks for all the excellent pointers, some of which I knew but most I did
not. I'm happy things turned out so well for you.

We recently had to navigate the Google Maps licensing obstacle course at
$work. I tried getting quotes from Bing, but it was just as hard to get a
number since we could only go through resellers. In the end we negotiated down
a bit and reduced our map usage. But the next go around I'm seriously
considering taking some time to investigate doing the maps ourselves. TileMill
looks gorgeous!

------
sunchild
Does anyone know how Google's new pricing affects use of MapKit in iOS apps?

~~~
marcins
I would assume Apple's existing licence with Google for using Maps covers
this.

------
dhcole
This a great overview of the open source mapping options out there. I just
posted some notes the other day on how MapBox pricing works for hosting custom
map tiles: <http://ds.io/A12Drf> and a comparison of overage fees for MapBox
premium accounts vs Google premier.

------
wildmXranat
And about the price, what are the bills like now ?

~~~
magicalist
I'd really like to know that too.

It can't be too cheap to serve that many views reliably and quickly. OTOH,
they are just NYC and they were already doing some things (like geocoding)
themselves, while the google maps price included features they would never use
(even implicitly, eg the cost of acquiring street data in other countries has
to be figured into google's cost structure).

~~~
sdelmont
we expect it will be under $1,000 per month... depending on traffic, since
it's mostly connected to bandwidth serving the tiles.

------
vedant
Douglas Adams is rolling over at this title. It should be "So Long, Google
Maps..."

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terinjokes
Moving the map around causes it to go black here in Chrome 18. But other than
that (with might be Chrome's fought), I think the maps look pretty nice.

~~~
tmcw
Sounds like you're on the current nightly. The bug was introduced this morning
by Chrome, and affects a large class of webkit-transform CSS. Like other
Chrome bugs, I expect it to soon be replaced by a new bug.

------
rplnt
What about bing? Compared to Google Maps in terms of pricing? I think their
maps are of great quality as well, much superior to OSM. In US at least.

------
muyuu
I'm starting to get worried about the long-term plans Google might have for
the apps I use that I'm rather locked-in to. Mainly gmail.

------
mikecx
Another option, though still expensive, is to use the Google Earth Enterprise
tools. They basically let you build your own private Google Maps though this
too runs into some problems.

1.) Imagery, 2.) Cost for GEE ($10k I think), and the cost of maintaining your
own servers to host it on.

I think it's still cheaper than going over the 20,000 free, but not optimal
either.

~~~
count
My understanding is that GEE still requires the Google Earth plugin, and will
not do a 'google maps' style interface?

------
RobertKohr
I think you ment "So Long, ..."

Anyway, good for google for charging for something. I don't see why it should
be free. But it was a blunder to charge this much from the start. It seems
like they want to get rid of customers.

------
fludlight
Where does the data for building shapes come from? Both Google Maps and the
OP's website incorporate it.

What is the format? Can I download the raw data in bulk (preferably for free)
for a data mining project?

~~~
jc4p
By shapes do you mean borders? Or do you mean buildings and things... The
borders come from <http://www.openstreetmap.org/> which is editable/exportable
in many formats.

~~~
fludlight
Yes...borders.

Open Street Map looks like it only provides 2D building borders while Google
has 3D. Google doesn't even provide an API for accessing it.

Bing also only has 2D building boundary data, albeit at a slightly higher
level of detail than OSM.

Is there an open source database for the 3D data or is that proprietary Google
info? Is OSM the only source for free building boundary data?

------
7952
It would be interesting to see if this effects the success of the site.
Despite its failing people are really comfortable with google maps.

------
funkah
Interesting. After years of paying through the nose for a Google search
appliance that actually wasn't very good, my company decided to replace it
with Solr, and it was a really fun project. We hired the Solr project's main
committer to consult with us and in the process submitted patches for bugs
that we ran into.

The whole thing cost less than one year of the GSA license fee, we can search
all of our content (the GSA had a hard limit on the number of documents it
would index), and the search results are _way_ better.

------
recoiledsnake
Charging is good since it keeps the product around, but Google's prices seem
ramp up suddenly from free to way too high suddenly. First Appspot and now
this, looks like their pricing is too out of line for small to medium
companies. They need a flatter pricing curve.

~~~
omfg
I don't think they really care. In the current landscape, Google Maps is a
competitive advantage for them and the less people using it the better. They
leverage it across the Android ecosystem, their new social network, etc.. and
it creates more work for their competitors to play catch up.

~~~
Confusion

      the less people using it the better
    

How is that? I would say the marginal cost of extra users is minimal,
especially given their (lack of) customer service.

~~~
Drbble
Parent means that less API users (product competitors) is better, not less end
users.

~~~
gcb
Maybe not... This thread got me wondering, one of the points in the article is
"why pay to have sites that look the same as the rest"

Maybe google prices is to remove gmaps from everywhere and sell only to
premium sites.

If they disappear users are already hooked and will migrate to the premium
sites that still have it

------
drewda
"TL;DR: We at StreetEasy decided to build our own maps using, among other
tools, OpenStreetMap, TileMill, MapBox and Leaflet, instead of paying hundreds
of thousands of dollars per year to Google. And yes, the money pushed us into
doing it, but we're happier with the result because we now control the
contents of our maps."

