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Comment by mani27 | Hacker News Reader

$1 billion for this app ? Wonder why fb is buying it. FB can build it on their own. Last year at a hackathon me and my friends made a similar app in 2 days. The feedback we got from people and judges made us to drop the idea to move forward with it.

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Waze is incredibly powerful if you're in a city with many users / high-density of cars. If Instagram can be worth $1B, I can certainly see Waze being worth at least as much. They have both users and awesome technology. Also, it's really hard to get mapping right (as Apple found out), so if Facebook wants to enter this space, it would be a powerful jumpstart. (also, the social aspects of Waze might tie in nicely with FB).

Still unsure why fb is buying it. I think Waze doesn't have a great user base in US. FB can build thier own app.

Facebook operates worldwide not just in the US.

What are you talking about. There are shit-tons of people where I use it on the east coast. When I'm in the fly-over states it's not all that great for speed trap reporting because there's just not the saturation, but it seems to be spreading quite nicely in bigger cities there too.

Although, I do have to say it feels like there are less users now than before some of the recent updates that seem to have really kind of messed with the mapping and routing.

I thought Apple was pretty bad for having no roads mapped in Belgrade.

Waze tops this, though - there are no roads in London, according to the Waze live map!

It's not about the app, it's about the users and the data. Especially since Waze's tech relies heavily on user-generated data.

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