Show HN: Café Wifi Search
cafewifi.com
cafewifi.com
It also contains opening hours, addresses, etc., which is all in OSM. I don't understand why people always try to start anew when the data is right there. I can understand there is some complexity in getting your user's contributed data back into OSM and dealing with edit conflicts and abuse, but at least use it as a starting point and see about contributing back later.
(Also, Google Maps is such a confusing map, I hardly even recognize the town I've lived in for 20 years. But that is probably because I'm used to OSM.)
- For people involved or passionate in the project, OSM is the database. All information is stored there and is available for consumption
- For people outside of the project, OSM is the website displaying the rendered map. As with all rendering, some information is lost, some is put in front.
If you want this information, you can use the overpass API (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API); at higher volumes you may want to get extracts of the db and query it directly, or use a custom renderer to have your own beautiful map with the data you want. Unfortunately there is no way to make the OSM website display specific information on a case-by-case basis.
It's a while since I played with OSM data for my own prototype, but I found most of the entries were 3 or 4 years out of date, and didn't include anything except a name and GPS co-ordinates. Some didn't even include a name. There was only one entry in my city with opening hours, and that entry didn't differentiate between days of the week. Some entries contained typos, and there was no consistency with naming of chains (eg one person calls it Dome, another Dome Coffee, another The Dome, and another Dome Coffee Fremantle).
In short, OSM was a really bad dataset (at that time) and I found it better to start from scratch.
Also, if projects like these would use OSM (some do, but not all), the quality gets better and it improves for everyone instead of for your specific project.
I populated my data manually. I visited stores personally, talked to staff & store owners, measured GPS co-ordinates & WiFi speeds & counted power outlets in person. "Do Things That Don't Scale." Even as one person, I was able to create a dataset for my city that was 2.5x larger than OSM had, with better accuracy and more comprehensive attribute data.
I got the idea after reading about the Google Maps Ground Truth team - turned out their secret sauce was an army of paid staff that could be sent out on demand to specific locations that needed to be verified in person.
This seems to be the point, though. I don't think that your parent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714467) is advising not doing any work yourself, but rather combining your work with existing OSM data rather than starting from scratch. Even if you took a simple algorithm, whereby you preferred any data you had for a location over any OSM data for the same location, surely you would wind up with a richer dataset?
To put it another way, surely GMGT is useful only in combination with heavy use of existing data sets, not in place of them?
That gives a messy, inaccurate dataset. It ends up including cafes that were closed years ago, places that aren't even cafes, or places several blocks from where they actually are. As a user, I don't think you want to walk out to a new cafe only to find that it doesn't exist. If you have to review the entire OSM dataset anyway, you may as well create your own.
I did make a few OpenStreetMap contributions years ago, but I see they've since been 'updated' to incorrect information by someone who doesn't even live in my city. It still has a lot of inaccurate and missing information in my area. At least for what I wanted to do (and for my city), OSM was a really bad dataset.
I don't know what terribly mapped place that is - probably one with lots of people where it made economical sense for Google to have a very high map quality, resulting in nobody using OSM - but I cannot imagine that that statement is true anywhere in the world.
I've only used OSM extensively in the Netherlands, Germany and Finland and the data is very good. The occasional time I go into Belgium, data is much less good, but the roads are there and that's usually all I'm looking for. And where Google Maps is fine in the Netherlands and Germany, OSM was clearly better in Finland.
> I see they've since been 'updated' to incorrect information by someone who doesn't even live in my city.
Might be vandalism, though I have yet to see the first case in my five years of mapping. I've seen incorrect edits, but usually it's just clueless people doing something wrong, and most of the time it's caught by people checking up on new users.
Is there a local OSM community that you can talk to, like for your country? Because invalid edits are not quite appreciated and I bet someone will jump on it when you mention it.
I mentioned above, but it's Perth, Australia. Google seems to have won the mapping wars here. Google even includes live feeds of how busy a store currently is (measured in realtime by Android phones), and shows busy/quiet trends for each store so you can plan ahead when you want to go.
The Open Street Maps Australia website appears not to have been updated since 2009.
Then why in the world don't you contribute it to OSM so millions of users can benefit from it? (Or maybe you did, I don't know, but you seem to be pushing a separate platform here.)
I did contribute some to OSM, but it looks like only a handful of edits before I just gave up on OSM altogether. Most of the OSM edits in my city (Perth, Australia) seem to be from 4 - 5 years ago and are somewhat out of date. I shelved my app, so I have no competing platform to promote.
Are you serious? If everyone thought like that, the world would be a much grimmer place with no volunteering work, let alone open source software or open projects such as OSM.
I understand that it might seem futile to contribute to a huge project (mapping the physical world) when few other people near you are helping, but please tell me you aren't serious about having something better to do than volunteering work in general.
If you'd like to volunteer yourself to do the work on OSM, go for it. You can do some of it remotely by researching coffee brands in my city, going to their websites & finding contact details for each of the stores. Telephone each store owner and ask them to confirm details you're not sure of. Then contact the city council for lists of local cafe businesses (probably already on their tourism website) and do the same process with those cafes.
I'll give you a head start: my two favorite cafes in the Gloria Jean's Coffees chain are both missing from OSM, if you'd like to add those.
[Edit: Actually it's missing 19 of their 20 stores here, so there's 19 POIs you could add for that cafe chain in my city. At 15 minutes per POI, it's about 5 hours work.]
People have tried to build massive databases of places, yet there are clear gaps in the data all over the place.
Perhaps topic-based apps and data are better. Here's the solution for that, starting with Café Wifi.
If you think one company and site can do everything well, look at what is happening to Facebook.
Something I found in my usage was that opening hours were more important to me than WiFi availability, and opening hours often don't match the public data (eg cafes that pack up their chairs an hour before closing). Power outlet availability was also important to me, until I bought an external laptop battery.
Nowadays I tend to use Google searches instead, as Google pays contributors to keep details in their area updated (eg free 1TB Google Drive after a certain number of contributions).
I like that you list actual network speed tests! That seems like a more objective measure than someone's subjective star rating.
Good luck with it!
They've removed the 1TB/100GB benefit entirely [1], but they seem to have achieved their goal (of crowdsourcing updates).
What happens to my files after the free storage expires?
Your files will stay saved in your Google Drive. If you don't have any more storage space, you won't be able to add more files unless you remove files or buy storage.
https://support.google.com/local-guides/answer/6345112?hl=en
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/d1a0jYa6...
I'm currently sitting at my desktop machine, but could easily add at least 5 Cafés with WiFi near Charing Cross in London. However, I don't have an android or iphone, so am unable to contribute.
Maybe letting people log in to the web version and let them add places? (and also maybe bulk uploads, i.e. every Costa and Starbucks has WiFi and it's trivial to get the location data for those stores.)
I did a search for "Cupertino, CA" and it said there was nothing, so I started zooming in on Cupertino from the world map. After I got to the city level it blocked me.
Otherwise, it looks cool. I like the idea of using an app to get some real time data.
If you want kudos for the work done, then good job for putting something together.
-From the comments I see you state network speeds, but there's nothing in my current circle so I can't tell if you can lead me to someplace with Verizon FiOS where I can finish a large backup job in a day as opposed to 3 months on cable.
-Can't change my location. Tried dragging the dot & clicking my current spot after searching my city at the top.
-No Android app, so there's the end of my testing.