Google MapMaker sucks

It took me a while to realize this.

There are a way better alternatives to this:

It’s not about “openness”.

And it’s not about technology.

It’s about usability, organization and the speed.

The speed?

Yes, the speed. The speed of your changes to appear in production maps. It is very important not only because it encourages people to make more changes, but because you can’t proceed further until your changes get accepted.

This probably can be fixed by technology. I.e., each user has it’s own fork of map. But how complex UI would that require to merge changes and resolve conflicts?

It would be great if MapMaker had auto-confirm feature. I.e., if nobody has reviewed the change in 24 hours (with some smart spam prevention system), it gets live.

Organization

It seems like Google has full-time employees to review user changes. But they can’t agree upon whether a specific change is good or not.

This is what motivated me to write this post. My edit’ve got rejected again.

Usability

I don’t know exactly why, but other projects have a better usability. While map maker looks cluttered with labels, openstreet map looks pretty clean without impacting the quality.

Overall, my experience with map maker was frustrating.

The future

Still, I believe that Google Maps has a great potential, especially when it comes to automatization of map creation. Probably they are trying to teach their neural network. If they don’t, they should.

License issues, however are discouraging.

Wikimapia tries to combine the best of the two competitors (Google maps and OSM).