It seems to me that the more people use Waze, the more up to date it will be and the more people will join Waze. And the avalanche of new users will begin!
In my area (near the South Coast), there don’t appear to be many Wazers (I’ll often be lucky to see two near my route) and I’d love to spread the word in my own local area to get lots more people joining quickly to start the avalanche going. I’m sure many others would like to do the same in their own local areas.
Do others agree, and if so, is there a good way we can achieve this? How can we each promote our own area?
Just telling friends all over the world is all very well, but if only a small number of people join in each individual area, the full up-to-date experience won’t happen. For example, I often find a traffic jam in a local road doesn’t show on the map as no other Wazer has driven it yet. It only shows as a jam once I’ve driven it myself which is too late for me!; I’m delighted to be contributing but it would be nice if these jams appeared more quickly (with other Wazers contributing) so we can all avoid the jams in the first place.
That would be the ideal situation, and in an ideal world it would be the social media bits, twitter and facebook, that would help with that but it seems that until all of the areas are mapped completely and people can start to trust the brand over the more established satnav systems, we are going to be fighting an up hill battle. You are quite lucky over there on the south coast seeing a couple of wazers on your route (there are a few problems with fellow wazers showing), I would be lucky to 2 in the whole of NI at times.
Just keep the faith, post things to twitter and FB and tell everyone! we’ll get there in the end!
Pip
Don’t overdo the twitter etc though. activating all the integration options in the app is a quick way of pissing your followers off. If there was an option to limit it to one tweet per day/week then I’d be happier to turn it on.
i have recommended waze to a number of people and the ones that start using it seem to tell their friends, which is what we want, but i have used waze to navigate from chelmsford,essex to cromer,norfolk and found that waze spends 50% of the time seaching for network during the trip.
it is almost as if there is a dead corridor between the two areas, which could be why you get no traffic reports around norfolk way and see so few wazer’s.
also i sometimes appear to be driving across white snowscapes during the trip as without network input the maps can’t update
I used not to recommend Waze - a long time ago - because I tried it, but people couldn’t get it to work at all, or make any sense of it.
But I recently started recommending again, and so far everyone’s been quickly converted. They love it. But I recommend personally when actually chatting to people and the subject comes up, I don’t use Twitter / FB etc.
I’ve recommended it too - cheaper / faster road updates / better traffic than TomTom etc as long as you have a decent amount of data on your mobile contract!
The Waze experience if definitely related to your network performance.
I’ve spent almost 4 years Wazing round the midlands where the O2 3G signal is (relatively) plentiful, however I have just changed jobs and I’m now doing a 40 mile each way commute into the Lincolnshire wolds where once I leave the lincoln are I get no data signal at all (let alone 3G) until I’m on the WiFi at the office which is about 45 minutes of Waze trying to connect.
I’ve just ditched O2 and moved to Three who have great 3G coverage in this area.
I amazes me that 10 years after 3G launched in the UK the tightwads at O2 still haven’t completed rolling out 3G to all their cells.
Have to agree with Dave2084 about data coverage being ‘the’ thing, over here in NI O2’s data coverage is rubbish outside of towns, quite often there is no data or phone coverage. This however isn’t too much of an issue as you rarely get any jams on the country roads, just on the M-ways.
Saying that, 3 is useless outside of Belfast and Orange is as good as O2. They’ll all have to up their game now the 4G fight is on
NI area manager (L4) Waze/WME Beta tester - iPhone 4s/5s iOS 7.0.2 (3GS 6.3.4 jail broken)