We had one of Google's photographers call my workplace a year or two ago asking if he could photograph the interior. Said it was for some sort of walking tour function they were looking to add. It's a small business—8 employees between two locations—and not a big space, either, so I can't imagine needing a lot of guidance? Right on, though.

To be fair, reading mall maps is a pain in the ass, as is finding one to read in the first place! We're all "too lazy" to read a road map, too!

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I used Google to navigate to work today. It doesn't give the same route as Waze. In fact, the only thing I noticed was that the estimated time remaining kept changing between green and amber, probably to indicate traffic density. Annoyingly, Google Maps for iOS plays voice instructions over the Bluetooth connection by default, and I couldn't find a setting to disable it.

Duked0g wrote:If you need evidence of the commercialisation of the Waze map, you can not have driven in the UK and not noticed the Nissan logo apearing all over the map.

I pulled over to answer my other phone (work) today and instead of getting the usual "are you stuck in traffic" I got Nissan branded pop-ups. I have no idea what they are about, and nissan cerainly dont have a site in the PC world carpark off Tolbar roundabout in Coventry...

On the plus side, does this mean we'll gain postcode searches? (Or, seeing as Waze will be a separate brand it will probably still require a separate Licence.)

The ads started a few months before the Google thing.

As for searches by post code, I'm not sure if we'll get them natively anytime soon, but as soon as the backup search switches from Bing to Google in your country, I would imagine it would start working. I can do searches by ZIP code in the US currently. The ZIP code does not show in the result, but the results are correct.

You can't add Google+ friends yet because change takes time. There are many more important features and problems the Waze development team needs to address first. I'm sure it's inevitable at this point.

iainhouse wrote:There are differing opinions over which method of highlighting is better. In my opinion, Google's highlighting is better if you want to look at the map & navigate yourself. Waze's is better if you're going to trust Waze to do the routing. If you hit a delay and nothing is highlighted, you can assume that this delay is normal for the time of day and hope that Waze has correctly taken account of it.

Agreed. Waze giving you a different route when you can clearly see on the map that there is "no traffic" on your usual route is no way to build trust. At a minimum, Waze should at least passively show you why you're taking the other way home.

AFAIK Google gets its traffic info in the UK from one of the mobile phone operators.I have noticed that Waze seem to have an equally dense indication on its route maps showing stretches of slow traffic. Surely such density is not possible using other Waze users' tracking alone?I an wondering ifa) Waze has a traffic activity feed from a UK mobile networkb) Waze gets to share Google's traffic activity feed

One thing that makes Waze better is how clearly on its map the slow stretches are shown, with a bright red line with traffic crawling like a queue of ants.

Google Maps on IOS by comparison forces me to squint hard for the same info. But especially, Google Maps does not have a list of alternative routes based on traffic info, like Waze does.

TomTom has used anonymised tracking info from the mobile operators for a long time - every phone is tracked based on tower triangulation and movement interpolation (rather than using the phone's GPS which would require the phone owner to enable it)