Google Latitude retired
support.google.com
support.google.com
Before I upgraded my iOS, I'd come to rely on Maps as a regular part of my life and couldn't live without it. But now it's just a painful experience.
This is the algorithm gone extraordinarily wrong. I really wonder if the guys who make decisions to change the UI or functionality of highly rated apps ever take time to really use their own creation. Because if they did, I don't see how they'd continue with their botched modifications to what was once a great app.
Why isn't there a match for the geocoding search? It's not because somebody "destroyed Google Maps on iOS", but most likely just due to a switch to a newer geocoding index. These would be updated frequently with new data from all kinds of sources, just like web search won't use a static index but one that changes over time.
Why wouldn't this kind of change be noticed when changing to a new set of data? Because it'd be essentially impossible to find all possible changes to geocoding results from a data change, and even less feasible to verify which of the results are correct. So there's always going to be some kind of sampling going on when validating new data or code changes. And with a sensibly sized sample, you're not very likely to be checking a particular intersection in a very large country.
These kinds of regressions would have popped in and out during the whole lifetime of Google Maps. Just because you noticed such a change for the first time doesn't mean that they are currently failing when they weren't before.
It is probably bad UX to not make it clear that this is what's happening. But it would be much worse to fall back to a local business search, drop a pin on the result, and have the user think that it was an actual geocoder result.
Intersection searches are rare, and there's a limit to how large a set of queries you can have in a "the results of these searches can never change" golden set. Again, these kinds of things have always happened with map data, it's not some kind of new phenomenon. I'd bet there's no less QA going on than during the times when you thought the quality was good.
No! Intersection searches are the norm, at least in New York City. And the intersection I listed is one block from the Empire State Building.
They may not be doing less QA. Just a crappier job.
You can pay Google for services as an end user.
It's a shame something like doesn't exist. I bet it would be fun.
I haven't been able to figure out a repeatable way to get this to happen, but it seems to have started happening in the last few weeks. Rebooting the phone usually makes it go away, but only for a short while. I haven't seen this weird keyboard disappearing behavior in any other app, so it makes me think it's something specific to Google Maps. It's making the app pretty much unusable.
Anyone else seeing this?
So now it's supposed to be ~1 way of sharing for all products. Latitude was location sharing, therefore the sharing should be integrated with G+. Normally doing the sharing via G+ wouldn't completely obsolete a product, but if _all_ a product does is share, it's ripe to be a feature of G+ rather than it's own product. That's what happened here.
Google is largely associated with innovation and they make everything to keep this image, but at the bottom their business is actually pretty boring: finding ways to show you an ad.
Advertising is your core business when almost 100% of your revenue comes from that. I wouldn't call what turned it from a dorm room project into a behemoth a "tack on", that's dismissing Eric Schmidt's contribution. What you do to achieve this goal doesn't matter as much. Amazon core business is e-commerce but they rent servers and sell portable devices.
> Ad relevancy is really just a natural extension of their Search algorithm.
You can argue that advertising is a natural extension of everything they put their hands on, from search to social networks to maps to glasses with HUDs. Everything they develop lately has advertising potential, and are shutting down everything that doesn't.
AdWords predates Eric Schmidt joining the Google board, let alone becoming CEO.
The rest of your argument is just silly reductionist wankery. Whatever the "core" of their business really is, they do have people working on those things. If you're going to make an incentives argument, make it; arguing where to put the "core" label provides as little insight as repeating "you're the product" ad nauseam.
The GP is exactly right. Yes, you do have incentives to maximize for advertising revenue. But if you want to maximize revenue over any length of time beyond the next quarter, you neglect things like having a product that's actually useful, usability, intrusiveness of ads, trust in your ability to keep information private from advertisers and the NSA, etc etc at your extreme peril. You can have all the advertisers in the world and it does you no good if everyone stops showing up to look at their ads.
Also, I was just pointing out the dichotomy between the core competency and core business (what you do well vs. your source of revenue).
Is it? I don't see any quality advertisement on Facebook or Twitter.
Never mistake a means for an end. Today, just like yesterday and tomorrow, advertisers want to make money and/or get publicity. What changes is how they can get there (or, many a time, how they _think_ they can get there). Today, that's through advertising on social media.
You've inadvertently summed up everything wrong with google and google+. Somewhere google lowered the bar for its products to "don't do something too bad" instead of "build remarkable things."
Google+ may not be bad per se, but it's far from exceptional. When you take something that isn't exceptional and begin forcing it on your users for the sake of strategy, I'll make a bet that it hurts your company long term. Of course, when you build something exceptional(such as gmail), you don't have to shove it onto your users because you've crazy inbound demand.
The Google+/Facebook version of being social on the web ought to have the word "social" in quotation marks.
I'm glad they kept that, I find it quite handy for several things, including as a cross check on how much time I spend at $client.
var time = time=new Date("2010/01/01").getTime(); //set this to start date
setInterval(function(){
window.location="https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/kml?startTime=" + time + "&endTime=" + (time + 2678400000);
time += 2678400000
}, 2000)
Sharing location on G+ is not the same use case at all.
Also he offers plenty of behind the scenes reasoning in replies to the thread, such as this:
"We felt that we'd be able to get quicker feature parity and better newer features by cutting over now than waiting."
As the Google wind-down goes on, I've lost all trust in them to keep any of their services running. I won't invest any more time into a new Google service anymore. The only question right now is Google Apps email. I like their Gmail iOS app, but I might switch to another ActiveSync provider (for iOS push support).
while amazingly providing less information
http://www.life360.com/latitude
We're also working on some new features that will make the app less "family oriented" and more universal for everyone.
There is a problem Error calling GET https://www.googleapis.com/latitude/v1/currentLocation?granu...: (404) Not Found
Here's the link from the post: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2998354?p=plus_locati...
We passively track how you spend your time – you don't have to do anything, and it lets you know where you’ve gone, with whom, and breaks your time into categories (work, sleep, exercise, home, social, etc.).
-charlie
As someone who used to use latitude occasionally to get together and find friends (fairs, small towns)I think I'll miss it.
The problem with it though was it was slow, thus typically outdated. So 90% of the time the information was simply not useful.
Lets explain it with a real use case, I want to meet my friend at an open air music festival with a lot of attendees. The classic way of doing it is calling him, but with the heavy music we will barely understand each other, plus it will be difficult to describe where we are to meet.
That's where the application will help : you select the contact you want to meet, it sends a SMS (or use the share dialog) requesting its location. The text contains a link to a site allowing any decent smartphone (even iOS/Blackberry/Windows Phone) to geolocalize him. Once done, you will get a notification on your phone displaying him on a map !
That's the beginning of the app, we've got a full backlog of ideas for the upcoming releases. Meanwhile, feel free to install, use, and tell what you would have loved to see in it.