[OSM-talk] Portal for end users

[Daniel Koć]

W dniu 15.09.2015 18:10, Joseph Reeves napisał(a):
> http://hello.mapquest.com/ [5] ?

Nice try, Sauron!... ;-)

I would say this is not the answer for OSM and for me this is half baked 
solution at best.

Nice things:
- Dynamic POI layers (but limited to some basic types of POIs)
- Satellite view (but limited to medium scale, at least in Warsaw)
- Traffic layer (but again, not working here)
- Menu for travel planning (I don't know which parts of the world are 
available in this service).
- Better low zoom.

...and that is all good (or just not bad).

Bad (or just lacking) things:
- High zoom levels are totally lacking details (osm-carto have it).
- Lack of different styles (we have 5 to choose).
- No innovative things (vector tiles for example).
- No personalization (like UMap).
- Ads.
- Lack of community control.
- Lack of OSM brand recognition (even copyright note is just one of 3 
and it's only to comply with the license probably).

It looks like a commercial traveler help, not general tool for end users 
of OSM. It may be a nice service in itself, but as a OSM portal for most 
of the people it'd be a failure in my opinion.

Our strength is a lot of details. We can show indoor levels of railway 
stations, 3D models of some buildings, insane amount of POIs and even 
their opening hours - but nobody will see it here. There's not a 
slightest hint you can start being a mapper if you want to add/correct 
some things in your neighborhood - which is another plus for end users.

Also, as it was already pointed out, we can't be sure what data are used 
and if one day it won't become YAMS (Yet-Another-Map-Service) which has 
nothing to do with OSM - or even simply hostile takeover by anyone with 
their own maps an agenda. And if we will promote it as a portal for our 
end users, we will make only this brand stronger, not our project brand 
(ever heard about GNU project eclipsed by other labels?). Or they can 
use our brand as a honeypot for mediocre/suspected services (ever heard 
about people downloading "Open Office" from third parties and mad about 
spam apps it brings?).

***

I'm happy to hear we may just have not enough horsepower at the moment, 
but we're not ignoring end users. It means we can mimic for example 
Mozilla in the future (dual social/commercial entity) or develop fair 
partnership with existing (or start-up) commercial enterprises, but we 
don't have to. We can also act as a hub and integrate some more external 
services, just like we already do with static map layers or routing 
services.

So if there are services like dynamic data layers or something 
UMap-driven which are ready to be a part of our hub, we won't have to 
rely entirely on our resources, while having the overall community 
control and brand recognition, with a smooth end user/mapper transition 
as a bonus.

Thanks for all your responses!

-- 
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags 
down" [A. Cohen]