One thing I can't understand is how difficult to make waze stable. If we take internet banking system or insurance system as example, their systems have to take more data but without any error such as...'your money cannot be transfer, please try it later...'
I've been using waze more than a year and hope waze can use the US$30M to rebuild its infrastructure.

Timbones wrote:

dmcconachie wrote: I would say waze has *significantly* more data throughput!

I would say banks and insurance companies have *significantly* more money!

love it

This is a great discussion - and I appreciate the effort of Alan in constructively bringing forward these valid concerns to Waze ; hopefully they will realize the criticality of the current situation.

Waze is a brilliant concept that has achieved a well-deserved amount of traction, user adoption (myself included!) and VC funding.

It's been mentioned in posts above, but essentially we're at a point where the baby is now growing into the pre-teen years and it's quite clear that the biggest challenge is meeting the requirements of scale.

I feel that the biggest challenge for Waze is that the concept is built on game mechanics, crowdsourcing and the emphasis (based on rewards, marketing and so on) seems to bolster that as a priority.

With so many users, Waze is rapidly approaching the point where it has become almost a utility to many users (myself included) in the sense that I don't care that I am the #3 Wazer in Canada, but it DOES matter to me that the core services are reliable and available.

Working in IT (for way too long) I know that this is what users value most - the value to them - what they get out of the service in tangible terms. If core functions, such as routing, are unavailable it negates any gain from rewards and the like.

We're all discussing this, but I'm quite certain that Waze leadership is reading these issues and checking their usage / adoption / retention stats and will prioritize funding accordingly.

In another words? Don't lose faith!

Rob

Alan, thanks for taking the time to express the editing team's frustrations clearly and frame them positively.

Waze wrote:We are temporarily halting the daily processes that digest the routes driven as well as updates the map and client tiles.
...
This includes redesign and development of major components such as the drive merging process and the tile creation which is estimated to take several weeks to complete.

Taken one way, this could mean that any editing we do may not show up on the client for a few weeks. I hope that's not the way it's supposed to be taken, since it's important to be able to respond to update requests with "the changes you requested will show up on your phone in a few days."

gettingthere wrote:Can you say - 'Mapcat - congrats on 2 million points?'

Do you really think they won't finish this until November?

let's hope that there will be a response ...
I'm wazing just for a few months now, but from what I see: general usability of app is becoming worse day by day, instead of improvements we have new problems.
I think that patience of many wazers is on the limit, mine is for sure.

Is there anyway we could crowd-source the redesign? From what I have seen on these forums, there is a lot of IS skill floating around. They would not have to tell us the secret stuff, just the basic data flows. Sometimes the right algorithm can make a world of difference.

Waze is a commercial company so complaining about not enough money is a complaining about their own business. As I already pointed, either this quality of the service is satisfying for them bringing enough money and they will not change anything or they will collapse and bankrupt eventually.

Talking about banks: do you mean that the banks and other big web services have better IT staff than waze?

I hesitated posting this earlier and so I drafted it, but after thought, it needs to be said. It is easy to sit in a chair and watch things progress, but there needs to be more work done.

Well, lets take this a step deeper. They got some funding from a source recently and they tie the funding to expansion in China... (according to their post on Facebook)

How about improving some of the vital things as well, I hope that it is up for consideration with that funding. When I go out for a drive and I see a problem, and then I come home to try to edit it and I get errors because of the host's problems, I continue on, such as "error saving, try again later". I then might forget about that edit and it may not get addressed until someone reports a problem. Need to improve redundancies and reduce down times.

There also needs to be a better way to handle error reports I think. So many are so vague! I know there are going to be plenty of editors that know this, and we fix what we can find...the reporting process should be fixed too. I think also having the ability to have more tools to help us editors for editing, such as when getting a report in the old cartouche, the report is for the addition of new roads to a new community, I would like the ability to have better control over the reports, such as prioritizing. They all need addressed, but when you get pages upon pages of reports to sift through, it would be nice to be able to have more control over that, at least to be able to sort more efficiently. While most of the time it is fun to do, it ends up becoming a chore.

So aside from the obvious issues, I hope that there is some effort to help improve on the essential functions that one, client users use everyday such as routing as I have experienced ever increasingly this past month, and two something for editors to have more control. I still haven't seen any ability to fix water features that are simply out of date today.

While I am ranting...We all want something for sure...uservoice I am afraid is the bad way to go about it though. For example, this isn't like sending and getting replies from Fej or other higher ups, but when someone sends a generic reply that while the suggestion is appreciated, please submit your suggestion to uservoice....there is a big disconnect there. Most people don't want to take that extra step, they already took the one, to notify the creator. People want simple and simplistic, not sophisticated and confusing. One, the uservoice doesn't even utilize the same log-in as Waze. I think people might be lost there in the fact they don't want to or trust it. People are already cautious as it is with phishing...so lets send them somewhere else to possibly risk their e-mail address security? Just saying, just saying.... I thought that is what most forums were for too? So we have forums and uservoice for suggesting fixes/changes? It is spread out too much, it needs to be centralized.

Waze isn't the infant anymore...it needs to grow and build upon what it has and is buiding. But there needs to be more structure and stability for sure. The Wiki is a mess, there is no order necessarily, where are project managers? I understand it is us, users who make it what it is and there are guidelines, but I also think there should be more from officials within Waze contributing to make Waze better so everyone is on the same page, everyone knows the same thing, not everyone suggesting this or that to what is a known at the time. We shouldn't be creating FAQ's or How-to's, we don't have the true insight. However, if Waze was to assign tasks to users for these subjects, than I guess that would be a different story, users creating user content, but no one is sanctioned user/editor, no one is making sure that the Wiki articles don't get corrupted by someone with ill intent, or are they?

Maybe I don't know as much as I probably could or should, but that's my two cents. The money looks great at first, and it goes fast, but please, spend it worthwhile to improve upon this great service, most importantly to me, the reliability needs improvement, and for the people who put countless time into editing, some recognition of that fact in how we volunteer and contribute our time. Not many users recognize that it is people like them editing. I think there could be more exposure and emphasis on that. It is easy to make a video that says all you have to do is drive with it on, but I truly wonder how many people realize they can get into cartouche. Thanks for your time all, we all have to come together on this though for sure.

I already volunteer a lot of my time to Waze as it is, what is a few more CPU cycles? I am for the projects that use parallel computing, distributed computer, or computer cluster style processing.

I think that having outages that appear when no one is around though should be minimal now, regardless of what server we might be using. We want a product that everyone can be happy with and not be expecting an outage soon. I mean, right now, if an outage were to occur at this second, it would be something a bit expected as it has happened almost repeatedly. Granted, we can't have god like services that run indefinitely, I even have to restart my computer that runs a weather station from time to time, I have to restart my phone, I have to turn off the lights in my house...ok, that was a bit harsh, but trying to be sarcastic too. My internet I had a good run of service for a year until this past month where about every week I was unable to connect. Waze isn't the only product or service that experiences this, I guess it is just easier for us to voice it?

We are all experiencing it, lets just hope that our thoughts and opinions aren't taken so lightly though, I hope that they are being given detailed thought, within means of course. But lets be a bit critical here, if we are expecting and planning China service now, for a country that has 4.39 times our USA population, and an factor of growth to come, I think that is something to take seriously and be ready for. The surge of users and data now will be negligible it would seem. 1.35 billion versus 310 million on a good day, it is easy to push a product out, but can it handle the load?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=po ... ted+states