Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish

https://plus.google.com/u/0/118383351194421484817/posts/foj5A1fURGt

by dlikhten • 15 years ago

536 154 15 years ago

plus.google.com

drewda• 15 years ago

"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."

recoiledsnake• 15 years ago

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.

angkec• 15 years ago

Agreed. They effectively pushed my startup from Appspot to Heroku.

omfg• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

  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.

Jeng• 15 years ago

Perhaps it is Googles way of not becoming a monopoly in a market segment?

By charging high prices for their solutions they end up fostering mom and pop solutions which would otherwise not have a chance.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

terinjokes2• 15 years ago

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.

tmcw2• 15 years ago

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.

vijayr• 15 years ago

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

kooshball3• 15 years ago

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.

dpcan2• 15 years ago

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.

cryptoz3• 15 years ago

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.

runn1ng• 15 years ago

Not only on the iPhone, but on the Android (sic!) as well. Actually, it's more convenient to use Facebook website than to use Google+ website.

At least on the Honeycomb tablet, can't talk about the mobile phones.

lukeschlather• 15 years ago

Spacebar to pagedown also breaks randomly, which is the primary way I scroll on a computer.

PhrosTT• 15 years ago

I've repeatedly considered building a HN Google+ scraper that grabs the text from Google Plus stuff and throws it onto a more readable cache that won't be blocked by work filters as social networking.

However I'm a little worried about stealing what may be Google's content.

pilif• 15 years ago

The blurring is a bug in Safari that is sometimes (I haven't investigated the exact cause) triggered when you scroll content below an element with position: fixed

In the case of Google+ that's the navigation bar.

Strangely, I could not trigger the issue when I was reading this post on my iPad. Now either Google has figured out the cause and found a workaround or the stars have somehow aligned correctly for it not to happen this time.

alanfalcon• 15 years ago

I read the article just fine on my iPhone. But when I view a G+ entry on my computer I get a huge "Suspended" notification because I used a slash in my name when I registered.

nopal• 15 years ago

I used Safari's Reader functionality.

Reader parsed it fine and displayed it beautifully.

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

Why not just tap "reader"? This post is perfectly pleasant to read on my 3gs in reader mode.

shazow2• 15 years ago

Could you post or email me a screenshot of this? I don't have my iPhone handy to reproduce it but I'll point the right people to this if I can explain it well enough. My handle at google.com.

baddox• 15 years ago

What causes that text blurring on iOS devices? I've encountered it on TechCrunch as well.

By the way, Hacker News is fairly unreadable on an iPhone because the text is so small text width so great. I haven't found a mobile interface that allows me to log in and comment.

rottencupcakes• 15 years ago

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Google+ is one of the easiest correctly sized columns of text to read on my iPhone.

The following is a screen shot. Do you care to elaborate on what is wrong?

http://imgur.com/xDksb

onedognight• 15 years ago

> It's the worst reading experience ever on the iPhone

Try the new-in-iOS5 "Reader" button in the URL bar.

zak_mc_kracken• 15 years ago

> It's the worst reading experience ever on the iPhone

Yup, but it's probably the best writing experience for most bloggers, and also people who don't have blogs. Even if you have one with a decent readership, the engagement you get from Google+ is far higher than anything you can get when people need to use RSS and a reader to follow you.

Garbage• 15 years ago

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

I wish the same, but for different reason. I can't open Google+ links in office. :(

sunsu• 15 years ago

He should just use my tool so he can host all those posts from his own domain while still posting to Google+: https://github.com/lylepratt/Plusify

sabret00the• 15 years ago

And there you've highlighted the issue with Google+. For some reason, people are so determined to see it work that they attempt to shoehorn it to be something that it isn't. Google+ isn't a blogging platform and shouldn't be treated as such. Google themselves own a blogging platform.

forgotusername2• 15 years ago

Protip: hovering over the link will display the full URL in the status bar. You should really spend more than a few milliseconds before deciding to get excited about something.

The Public Suffix List (publicsuffix.org) might be useful for this, although I doubt plus.google.com is listed in there (no same-origin security considerations). It's still the only systematic approach I know of that even remotely addresses the problem you're describing.

meepmorp2• 15 years ago

> Protip: hovering over the link will display the full URL in the status bar. You should really spend more than a few milliseconds before deciding to get excited about something.

You're assuming he's using a device with a mouse. And why not add a simple feature that makes usability better on all platforms? Special case google plus here, just because this is such a common complaint. I've wanted it for a while, too.

there• 15 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3252502

jraines• 15 years ago

Here's a userscript that makes HN show all subdomains. If you're in Chrome, just click on "Raw"to install.

https://gist.github.com/1522657

kooshball3• 15 years ago

Excellent.

I was just about to write a Chrome extension to do this.

MetallicCloud• 15 years ago

I'm using an extension in chrome for that...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/home

For me it displays as (plus.google.com)

kennywinker• 15 years ago

People use google plus enough that a special hook to note that it's from google plus, not google.com would help immensely.

unobfuscate• 15 years ago

I just assume any google.com url's are for G+, less surprised that way.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

I really wish there is a way to show more than just the domain name next to the title.

There is. I installed the user script Show Full Domain on Hacker News posts,

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121512

mentioned in an earlier Hacker News thread, and it works well. I knew the submitted article was from plus.google.com and was able to anticipate its content accordingly.

(I am running this user script on Chrome.)

fsniper• 15 years ago

As much as I'm with you on this. This is not the place to discuss over HN's features or GooglePlus experience over hand held devices. Sometimes I wish we could move these discussions to some other place. I'm here to read and discuss about the article. But I'm welcomed with tens of comments unrelated to it. This is annoying.

wildmXranat• 15 years ago

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

magicalist• 15 years ago

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).

sdelmont2• 15 years ago

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

mikerg87• 15 years ago

It sounds like it was going to be around $200-300,000 a year after a discount was applied from the google sales staff. With the other numbers bandied about in the text it sounds like that represents a 50% discount based on their current and projected usage.

demetris• 15 years ago

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)

7952• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

jcampbell1• 15 years ago

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

terinjokes2• 15 years ago

But they mention that in the text. Sure it's not something that happens now, but since now they generate the maps, they can add them or anything else they want to add to the maps.

zackola• 15 years ago

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

ubercore3• 15 years ago

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.

nodogbite• 15 years ago

I've been using Streeteasy.com a lot over the past few weeks. Sometimes I get Google.com maps, and sometimes I get the Open ones. I always think that the Google ones look and function much better. I hope the open ones improve, but it's not there yet.

dhcole• 15 years ago

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.

Roboprog• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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...

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

sunchild• 15 years ago

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

marcins• 15 years ago

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

mikecx• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

rplnt• 15 years ago

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.

blhack• 15 years ago

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...

sdelmont2• 15 years ago

it's tied to the domain name of the page including the maps javascript (that is, the referrer for that JS request)

cullenking2• 15 years ago

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.

kuahyeow• 15 years ago

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

aasarava• 15 years ago

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.)

notaddicted• 15 years ago

This isn't 100% what you're asking about, but http://mapsfromscratch.com/ has instructions for how to render and server map tiles, where you basically control the whole stack.

saras• 15 years ago

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.

ma2rten2• 15 years ago

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?

jsnell• 15 years ago

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. ?

jroseattle• 15 years ago

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.

kapitalx• 15 years ago

> 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

ajtaylor• 15 years ago

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!

pud• 15 years ago

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.

tmcw2• 15 years ago

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.

fludlight2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

fludlight2• 15 years ago

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?

vedant• 15 years ago

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

muyuu• 15 years ago

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.

RobertKohr• 15 years ago

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.

Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish

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