OpenStreetMap is awesome but not really a map service, it hosts the open data and the map editor/wiki. You can use their map to a certain extend but if there was a huge spike in traffic, their site would fall. If you want a good service based on OSM with directions and more, you have to use something else such as mapquest which is US based or host it yourself.
Though, MapBox is extremely expensive if you require SSL support (because your site is on SSL) and you are a startup. You can't even solve it yourself by performing the SSL termination and proxying the requests as that is prohibited in their T&Cs.
But at least they exist and offer a really beautiful map style based on the OSM data. Still US based though, but they also provide TileMill so you can host your own (though not using their very good Streets styling).
On the data side there's the recently launched http://opencagedata.com (disclosure, I'm the founder).
The point is with OSM there's more than one way to do it. You can dive in, get your hands dirty and do it all yourself, or work with a rapidly growing ecosystem of service providers who do the work for you at a cost. With private geodata / map providers, be they internet giants like Goog or national mapping agencies there is their way or ... their way.
My biggest use-case for maps on web-sites is to simply communicate a location.
Not to navigate by car, by bike, by foot. Not to show advertiser bubbles, or utilities.
Just a clear communication of "The point in question is in this neighbourhood, at that point.".
For me, that's the beauty in MapBox's Streets style... it does that one thing really well. Retaining enough countryside detail to make location recognition very good, and it works brilliantly in a city. Yet at the same time it's neutral enough to look great no matter how bad the design of the web-site it appears on.
I definitely prefer non-US, and non-giant mapping providers, but there's a lot to be said for cartographers who design maps to be useful generically for location recognition rather than anything else. I strongly feel that this is what Google Maps got so right, and is also why MapBox will do very well.
I agree with this, which is why the new Google Maps rubs me up the wrong way. I don't like how it changes the emphasis of different streets and roads depending on what you've searched for. A major road is a major road, and shouldn't turn into a minor road just because the restaurant you clicked on isn't on it.
We look at a map of our town or city, and the main roads in and out are the spines - everything is off one of them. If you turn those white, and remove the emphasis, the map becomes far less readable.
It's fairly easy (days work) to set up a Geoserver web map server to provide the data you need as a Web Map Service.
You could use parent's data.
People should note the GetFeatureInfo interface that WMS provides for asking about the entities in a particular part of the map - click a house, yield the address and owner as XML (if you have that data).
Then you'd use openlayers to implement the web map on your site.
A 'roll your own' solution like this is only a good idea if you want to do something special, but an off the shelf solution constrains what you believe you can do. Imagine if every start-up was doing their site in wordpress.
I personally find that the users prefer the CloudMade API in terms of the quality of results that come back from geolocation searches.
The maps work fine, and the site could do with an update... but where CloudMade struggles is the design of the maps. At certain zoom levels (quite zoomed in) and within particularly dense areas (centre of Paris and London) they're just ugly. Which would be fine were it not for the fact that where there is high-density there is also a lot of users.
Both CloudMade and MapBox allow you to run custom styles... but unless you are a designer and/or cartographer who knows what you're doing, you're likely to make a hash of it.
Getting a good design for maps is very very hard, making something ugly is shockingly easy. Neither CloudMade or MapBox can prevent this, but at least MapBox's default is really quite beautiful.
On Firefox linux, both 21 and aurora, their "Start now" example doesn't work: when I zoom all the tiles requests end up in "400 bad request". Chromium works.
The advantage of OSM is that ability to host if offline. I used OsmAnd+ on my droidphone for offline maps and navigation, and it expertly got me through Europe great.
Google Maps for mobile devices fundamentally fails because mobile data coverage is far from ubiquitous or reliable for something that important.
Google Maps on Android at least allows downloading maps for offline use. I've used it lots of time when traveling and it works great.
The only slight downside is there is a limit to how big a single downloaded map can be. So if you want to download all of Europe you have download it as a whole bunch of smaller maps and switch between them rather than a single big map, but realistically I've never run into problems with the size limitation
Another limitation of Google Maps is, it does not provide offline navigation which becomes very important in places where you don't have mobile data coverage.
I prefer the OSM offline maps for this reason. They don't do routing/navigation per se either, but they do let you search for addresses and POIs, whereas offline Google Maps doesn't. I don't usually need turn-by-turn directions so that's typically good enough for me: at least it means I can type in the name of a museum rather than having to scroll around the map hunting for it.
This is a seldom known fact that catches people out because most assume that if you have the map locally, it will help you traverse it locally. My personal story on this is going across the border to see an NFL game in Detroit last year, turning off data because of the usurious rates Canadian carriers charge for roaming. When leaving I couldn't navigate at all -- despite the relevant map being available -- so I had to turn data on for a couple of seconds just for Google to get the route. $20 for 3MB of data. Someone relying upon it when they're out of cellular range would be in a much worse situation.
You know, people did manage to navigate before the advent of GPS based navigation systems. They looked at a map, planned out their route, watched for the appropriate streets, and if they got lost, stopped and looked at the map again.
If you have the offline map, you can still do this even if you can't use the GPS navigation feature.
No kidding. Thanks for sarcastically pointing out the obvious.
I can make coffee by pounding my own grinds and boiling water over a campfire. But if I wake up expecting to turn the coffee maker on and can't, it can throw off my day. Further Google Maps is a terrible, terrible way to handle navigate on a smartphone, especially in a dense urban area with layers of highways.
Apologies for the sarcasm. I was merely trying to point out that navigation may not be worth the ridiculous roaming charges, and instead just using it as a static map is possible.
If you can find Wifi, that will also provide the necessary connectivity to enable your navigation route to be downloaded. This is how I got around rural Nevada, Utah, and Arizona with my Galaxy Nexus.
From the OSM home page:
"We started it because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways."
To me, this is the biggest issue using other mapping services. T&Cs can be a real pain - API usage restrictions, data usage restrictions, quotas, licensing.
Mind you the restrictions themselves are not the big deal but the fact that most major mapping providers don't make these restrictions clear enough - you have to sift through the terms page in most cases and read vaguely worded "legalese" to figure out if what you're attempting to do violates their terms of use.
I wonder if any American public agencies like NASA satellites pictures being public domain has something to do with that.
In Europe we pay public satellites companies an arm and a leg, and then the information is not free for taxpayers. You have to pay or fill long forms justifying the use of the data for an European company.
If you are the son or daughter of the required politician your request will be granted, if not you will wait as they simply ignore your message. I did it myself.
This means that any European maps startup(Asian is even worse), serving Europe's market is really f*cked from the start.
There is public domain satellite imagery for USA and Europe available from the US Government (e.g. NASA). There is public domain map data available for the USA, but not Europe available from the US Government (e.g. Tiger data).
Ironically Apple Maps is based on Tom Tom's cartography (but succeeded in making things worse).
Tom-Tom is a company from the Netherlands which acquired Tele Atlas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tele_Atlas)
So the real question is: Is it complete? Not "is it global". But I'm sure OpenStreetMap is incomplete as well, although maybe less incomplete than others.
Probably the biggest problem with OSM (that the likes of GM doesn't have) is inconsistant coverage within a country. GM will be pretty consistant in how well mapped a country is all over the country, whereas OSM might have one city mapped very well, but another region be very blank.
Doesn't even have to be that remote: Google Maps coverage of Crete is surprisingly bad. Not only is it incomplete, but it's also wrong in a number of places, e.g. mislabeling footpaths as roads (and gated private driveways as roads, and miscellaneous other things you can't drive on).
It's a business, so they update the maps, where it makes the most sense from a business point of view. Making quality maps is a very labor intense task and looks simpler from the outside, than it actually is. google for instance has more people working on their maps than TomTom has employees in total (which is betweem 3k and 4k). That's how intense it is...
(full disclosure: I worked in TomToms maps division for 7 years).
So I think you're actually agreeing with the OP. "where it makes the most sense from a business point of view" is a subset of "global".
Your point about the amount of effort to curate map data is well taken, too. But doesn't that mean that a crowdsourced approach makes sense? It might be possible to build a data set that no one company could afford to pay to build.
Every map is a subset of global - it's inevitable that there are newly built roads, private roads that mapping companies can't reach, dirt tracks that no-one has reported as missing from maps, temporary roads, roads that can't be seen in aerial photographs and so on. OSM also has omissions in areas where there aren't any OSM volunteers nearby to do the mapping.
The question is what distribution of omissions is acceptable before a map ceases to be global :)
It makes sense, where the data is available to you, but modern maps contain attribution that has to be licensed from 3rd parties(RDS/TMC codes for instance). You cannot include those, since you don't own the copyright.
Another example was the 7-digit postal codes in the UK: Before the UK did this big open data push, those had to be licensed as well.
I am all for open maps, but some things are just impossible to do legally with OSM.
The relevancy of that depends on what the motivation for declaring OSM the only non-US map.
If it's with reference to NSA (one can only guess, but that seems to be in line with the times), that you won't get tracked, it's irrelevant where the map was made, as long as the map servers are operated outside the US.
In russian version they did very user-friendly editor for their maps called "People's map" and they already show it in their mobile apps. Of course, from licensing perspective, OSM is much better.
Navteq is part of Nokia. And Nokia Here [1], their maps service (used by MS, Yandex, etc), is actually mostly divided between offices in Germany and the US.
Actually, Navteq is no longer an independent entity since 2011-2012. The business unit is now called HERE [1] and mostly divided between Germany and the US.
It provides maps services for MS, MapQuest, Garmin, Amazon, Yahoo! Maps, Yandex, BMW, Oracle GIS...
Why would I directly use it through browser and not third parties? What is their differentiating factor? I am not being facetious, but just being curious. I only know 4 square and maybe Apple uses their data.
Because in a lot of places, OSM has more accurate points-of-interest coverage.
I maintain the map for a fair chunk of Soho in London. On Google Maps, I've seen places I know about filled with points of interest that aren't actually there, geo-targetted SEO spam and so on.
For various bits of London, if the map says it's there, I either put it there or checked it.
I just checked an area of London that I maintain for OSM but on Google Maps: it's a load of shit. Shops and businesses that closed years ago still on the map. Large corporations inside police stations. The Victoria Embankment Gardens marked as being in the River Thames.
Depends on what your use case is. If you just want maps on a page, third party is the fastest, easiest way to go, no doubt.
The key point with OSM though is that if you actually want to build something with a geo aspect that uses the underlying data you can. With Google you can't. That of course doesn't mean it's easy to do, but the possibility is there.
