I’d suggest the ability to “pull-down” via a tab ribbon favorite establishments while en-route. Assuming that as part of my preferences I setup “Refreshments -> Starbucks”, “Food - McDonalds”, “Hotel - Motel 6”, “Fuel - Shell” (if no 2nd level is defined than it is the 1st level Fuel vs 2nd level Shell)
While en-route with a tap a ribbon would pull down and I’d tap on Fuel or Fuel-Shell and Waze would point out the next Fuel or Fuel-Shell instance and offer to temporarily route me to it.
This could be monetized with Starbucks,Hotels, etc. etc since essentially they would get extra traffic to their establishment (i.e. 10% coupon code, etc)
Sounds like an exiting trip! But I would rather prefer that Waze came up with a standardized API, a way to hook up all the services mentioned and then some.
That way, Waze could concentrate on routing, and providers of locationbased data worldwide could easily hook up with it.
Waze has done that before; it somehow integrated with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook. “Somehow”, because there is no published interface, it is not known how it works exactly (not to my knowledge). A published API could be open for anyone to publish data in Waze.
Technical savvy Wazers could hook up these services, or such services could do that themselves. For Waze it could mean a lot of interesting content that would not require much development time once the interface is defined, developed and published.
In Waze you could then potentially find 100s of such, from B&B in europe to gasprizes in the US, open parking spots, hospitals, foursquare venues. Every Wazer could select layers of data he is interested in. Think of selecting a layer of gasstations, represented as gaspumps on your map and maybe shown tabular with distances and prizes, or automatically picked as a “via” in your route.
If it picked up, it could show similar growth as the groups!
Also, more content will attract more Wazers for sure.