I don't personally care about Latitude, but it does seem recently that Google have been on a crusade to ruin Google Maps on mobile devices. The two most noteworthy instances: (1) screwing up the offline-maps feature (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/Ck_Pd6UgZ... -- but they've slightly walked this back: see https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3246076) and (2) adding advertisements to the Android version of Maps: http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/attract-new-customers-... (I don't mind this at all on the web version of Maps, where I'm usually on a display with plenty of pixels, but on a mobile device that's a whole lot of space being taken up by advertisements instead of actually useful information).
Google Maps on iOS has been destroyed. It is incredible how good solid apps commit suicide. For example, I entered "34th and 6th ave ny,ny" for my end destination. Soon as I submit, it renames it to "34th Street Partnership". Few weeks ago it would rename to some chiropractor's office a full avenue away.
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.
The app is fine. Google just really has trouble with 6th ave for some reason. Try it on maps.google.com, it has the same problem ("Avenue of the Americas" almost always works, but who wants to type that? (or call it that?)).
It worked fine in the previous version. The concept of auto changing street intersections or street address with names of random venues sucks and is inaccurate at so many levels. That it would make it to the product symbolizes an overall failure with the present Maps team.
That kind of rewriting would be stupid, but of course isn't what's actually happening. In reality there's no match for the geocoding search [34th and 6th ave ny,ny], so it is interpreted as a local search for [34th and] in the vicinity of [6th ave ny, ny].
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.
The issue has more to do with google trying to match each address with a business. They are failing because 34th and 6th is one of the most popular tourist corners in NYC which you'd think would be tested during QA. Moreover most Maps users will attest that when they enter an address they do not want it auto translated to the venue name...again something that should have never made it beyond an idea stage or been reverted soon after release.
No, I'm quite sure that the issue is that geocoding search fails and Maps has to fall back to a local search.
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.
My current theory is that this is a simple extortion ploy: After getting me to depend on Android Google Maps, they have replaced it with something unusable. Shortly they will release Google Maps Classic for $49.95/year. I will happily pay that; it's cheaper than the blood pressure medication I'd need to counteract all the rage-inducing misfeatures they've put in the latest version.
If only there were some kind of well-understood cultural phenomenon where people could say hyperbolic or absurd things for the amusement of their fellow humans.
It's a shame something like doesn't exist. I bet it would be fun.
Google Maps on my Android (Galaxy Nexus) phone has now developed an annoying habit of making the keyboard disappear while I'm typing in an address. I type in a couple of letters and the keyboard slides out. I tap again in the input box to bring it back up, type in another letter, and then it slides out again.
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.
I used to hit this a lot in Maps on Android. It would happen whenever the GPS position fix changed; my location would change and it would 'reset' the UI for some reason, hiding the keyboard.
I'd recommend moving to one of the OpenStreetMaps apps for offline usage. They allow basic things like the ability to search for points of interest while offline, so you can do things like ask where the Metropolitan Museum of Art is and get a pointer on the map. Google Maps doesn't really provide a proper offline mode with such functionality, and never has. All they do is cache images that they let you zoom/pan, and not even that works properly.
Sponsored locations were already a part of the old Android and iOS apps, so its more accurate to say that they're bringing the ads back to the new design.
Google's push towards Google+ reminds me of Microsoft's arrogance in forcing their vision of Windows 8. An established company trying to get another piece of the pie that is not their core competency. It's too bad Google is trying to get into the social game. I wish they would stick to the "serious" endeavors that started out with, more Wolfram Alpha, less Facebook. They don't have to own the entire internet, just do things that they can do better than anyone else...
The "push" to Google+ is more trying to correct the mistakes of the past where for N products that had a sharing feature, there were at least N ways of sharing things. That's just broken, confusing and cumbersome for users. G+ the platform is just the sharing layer for all Google products. G+ the stream is almost a separate thing that uses G+ the platform for sharing posts.
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.
The "serious" endeavors, like glasses and self-driving cars are not their core business. Not even search or email are. Their core business is advertising, and social media is what advertisers want today.
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.
Just because Google doesn't make its money on innovation directly doesn't mean the two can't be associated. Innovation rarely is a direct source of income, Google's ads would be worthless without all the innovation that comes out of Google, these innovations are search, maps, android etc.
I would say that indexing and making usable information in different contexts is their core competency (Search, Email, Maps, Desktop, Android, etc.) Advertising is a "tack on" to bring in the money, it's not where they are developing new value to the end user. Ad relevancy is really just a natural extension of their Search algorithm. If you're a business person you might say Ads is all Google is, but they still need to develop compelling products (core competency) to bring in views.
> Advertising is a "tack on" to bring in the money
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.
I wasn't attributing AdWords to Eric though, but the company growth. If I'm not mistaken, he was responsible for the company growth 2001 onwards, and focused on the cash cow.
Also, I was just pointing out the dichotomy between the core competency and core business (what you do well vs. your source of revenue).
Who are _advertisers_? I don't see the advertisers spending millions of dollars (coca-cola, car brands, medicals) on social networks. I do see them on TV, magazines, and search.
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.
I don't get this complaint. All of these services have a social component built in, so why not just put them all under one umbrella? It's not like Google+ does anything remarkably bad.
It's not like Google+ does anything remarkably bad.
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.
Actually when they day comes for me to finally be social on the web, Google+ will be the best option. I just hope they do not make it impossible to use unless you are using Chrome.
I used location history a lot, and I am now looking into other gps logging apps because they removed API access to history. The export you can do is only KML and doesn't have information like accuracy for each coordinate, leading to a bunch of non-sense locations you can't easily filter out. I wish they simply had an easy way to subscribe to your own location data, because otherwise many applications are impossible (such as using your real-time location, or for personal analytics).
For anyone wanting to liberate their data from here, paste this into the JS console with the history page open (only tested in Chrome):
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)
Doesn't know when to stop, so close the tab when you have all the data you want.
I don't understand why Google kills and replaces things seemingly with no thought of migration paths. Anyone know more about what goes on internally that causes companies to just throw up their hands in defeat on a product, forcing users to just start over? Is it really that hard to shim the Latitude APIs over the new service?
This was handy, I'll miss it. Luckily my SO is an iPhone user so I still have her on Find My Friends...
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).
Yeah, I frequently find myself clicking back over to classic because I simply can't figure out how to do what I want in the new mode. When they take away my ability to do that, I'll groan and curse and increment my "reasons not to get excited about the Next Big Thing from Google" counter.
The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that they have continued offering location services as part of Google+, but they've retired a service that works on iOS for one that does not. This strikes me as an incredibly user-hostile action.
Try Life360. While family-oriented only in name and marketing at the moment, we are cross-platform on iOS and Android and also have a Latitude importer.
Depends on use case. Location history, you can just keep using Google Maps. Telling others where you are: http://www.glympse.com/, but that is more for a specific period of time rather than passively sharing it as Latitude did.
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.).
I think there integrating location finding into google+. Its not a great answer, because I'm not sure how location sharing works in google+, but under preferences you can make you location available. Then when people click on your profile they can see where you are.
As someone who used to use latitude occasionally to get together and find friends (fairs, small towns)I think I'll miss it.
There was a real use case for latitude, but I don't feel like they pulled it off right. I live in MA, and my brother lives in WI. We decided to meet each other in NY once while he was with friends. We used latitude as a way to communicate our location as we tried to find each other. It worked a lot better than saying "meet me at the shake shack" since neither of us knew the area.
The problem with it though was it was slow, thus typically outdated. So 90% of the time the information was simply not useful.
Hi there,
I wanted to let you know the Android / Web application we made with a friend, it is called lclz.in (http://lclz.in). We created it because the end of Google Latitude and the lack for such app.
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.
