at least you can see what good is closed access to crowdsourced data good for. luckily i did not contribute a single poi/line/polygon to waze so no effort wasted there

Boiler_81 wrote:I have put a lot of time into Waze editing. I am currently #16 with 1,850,000. I can not stand FB due to their lack of privacy. I will be going back to Google Maps if this happens.

why google maps? wouldn't contribution to openstreetmap make a lot more sense?

eichmat wrote:

jasomslon wrote:at least you can see what good is closed access to crowdsourced data good for. luckily i did not contribute a single poi/line/polygon to waze so no effort wasted there

You may not have explicitly contributed, but every mile/kilometer you drove helped Waze improve the map... anytime you drove through a turn that wasn't known allowed a map editor to make a correction.

I'm quite sure that if you use Google's option, you're most likely making the same contributions...

sure. but contributing by using waze is only passive way of contribution, something like a by-product. i mean, you're contributing to google just by using gmail in the same way. i have no problems doing that - there's no other way around either way (unless you do proxying or stuff like that).

an active contribution however is a different story - you invest a lot more time and skills when doing that. and what you receive in return? a waze badge, recognition and hope that you'll still be able to retrieve _your_ edits (ok, it's not yours, it's waze's) after some time?

gettingthere wrote:Another day, another takeover rumor. Who cares who owns what? If it stays as a 'free' navigation application and does what you want, use it.

Such big threats. "I will quit being your free customer if you do this." Funny.

The threat is that people will stop editing the map. If a handful of users leave, it's no big deal, but if the veteran map editors decide that they are no longer willing to spend thousands of hours doing uncompensated work for an entity like Facebook, then it will hurt. The value is in the maps and the routing algorithms.

With a ridiculous number like $2,000,000,000, figure that half of that goes to the technical end, and the other half goes to the map. If you take the top 500 map editors who have done 99.9% of the map editing work, the work that we've already done becomes valued at around $1,000,000 each. Do you think they're going to cut each of us a check when the sale is complete?

That being said, if I was one of the partners, and had that kind of offer on the table, I'd have a really hard time passing it up.

merida-scv wrote:Ah, but FB users will flock to Waze in even larger quantities.

And they'll do for Waze what the <blink> tag did for Geocities.

What I was hoping was that Waze would become the next giant like Google or Facebook! Then they could gobble up all the new startups.

I'd like waze to tell me which gas stations serve real bacon and which ones serve turkey bacon.


Via my iPhone 4S.

TruckOttr wrote:Eventually the Social Media bubble will either burst or deflate.

Yeah, like that TV fad back in the 60s.

merida-scv wrote:I'll stay. The online universe already has all of my info and I'm under no illusion that anything I share is in any way protected by anyone, regardless of what they promise.

dmcconachie wrote:People have to make a living, servers have to be paid for. Nothing is free.

In the immortal words of Kent Brockman


I actually think this could make waze better - just think all that computing power (immediate edit updates), User Interface designers and coders to make waze so much better than it is today.

Unfortunately I would leave as well. As others have mentioned, Faebook would likely advertise heavily on it. Boo.