Obsoleting Google Maps

General talk
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Perhaps I’m new and naive (I’ve been using OSM for nearly a decade, and administering IT systems for two, so maybe not) but I’d like to see a day where OSM becomes the default in people’s minds for mapping, and we look back on Google maps as today we do on Mapquest…

There’s a long way to go of course. But is there a bulletpoint list somewhere of the goals we would need to achieve to supplant Moogle Gaps as the world’s defacto map service and how we might go about those things?

For example, I sort of doubt OSM wants to host business reviews. But nothing says there can’t be a review site that references a business ID that our map also does. And then those reviews could appear alongside the map either on OSM directly or on a site that imports it.

Navigation. Gas prices. Street View…

Has there ever been a statement by “OSM leadership” that “we don’t want to interfere with google” or that “our goal is to be the best map”?

I think there should be an open list of things that OSM has yet to implement, to help focus effort on closing that gap, because I believe an open collaborative cooperative service is just better for humanity than one controlled by a single company.

I’d love for example if there was an easy way to create shareable maps. place markers or paths on osm using the editor for things of personal significance that might not be appropriate for the main map (the route of a race for example), and be able to share that with a unique link to osm.

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Maybe we should first ask ourselves the question: do we provide data, or an end-user product? Currently OSM provides data, not end-user oriented products (unless you count the OSM website). And I’d say a shift in the goal of the project towards developing end-user products is neither realistic nor desirable.

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not disagreeing with you (especially re:realistic) but could you elaborate why it’s not desirable?

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It may not be realistic to develop end-user products, but there’s a question whether you get the comprehensiveness if there’s no good end-user products that rely on the information?

And if this is the goal, does the openstreetmap.org page convey that adequately? As a new visitor how would I discover all the great apps that rely on OSM? My first impression is honestly that it’s an ugly map :slight_smile:

While the street dataset is great, e.g., the POI dataset is a bit lacking as I’ve mentioned before. It could potentially improve as Organic Maps seem to be open to show the age and integrate reviews

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I’ll quote (and paraphrase, and translate) from Pascal Verbeken’s book “Brutopia” here (specifically the section where he talks about the end of the anarchist colony L’Expérience): “The majority of organisations die off as a result of one or two reasons, (1) fading of the original goals, and (2) internal contradicting opinions.”

I won’t say I fully agree with this statement (it might be more relevant to the anarchist colony in question than to organisations in general), but it’s interesting to think about it. There are various examples of open source projects “splitting in two” because different developers disagree on some specific features. Back in the days I was still active in climate activism, I’ve seen the internal struggle in YfC Belgium. And (maybe one for the Brits among us): more than 100 years after its foundation, the National Trust still doesn’t know what its purpose is, because the founders disagreed on it and it has never been properly defined.

So applying this to the OSM project: providing data and providing end-user applications are vastly different things. They require a fundamentally different base of contributors and the funding would need to go to very different purposes. Changing the “purpose” of the OSM project from a database to a collection of apps will inevitably divide the contributors. I view it as both a fading of the original goals and internal contradicting opinions.

So to finally answer your question: I think it’s undesirable because it will lead to a split (minor or major) in the community. Apart from that, there’s obviously the question whether OSM should be a data provider or a collection of apps, but that’s a larger discussion.

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Compete with Google Maps? Don’t do it. Do the best we can, within reason and almost without budget.

One thing we could learn from the tech giants: focus more and better toward end user applications. Which would require smooth integration, real QA instead of best effort, and product control/version control of end user services and applications from start to end. And a single reliable representation of the data, removing the educated-guess-system we now force upon the data users.

Yes, there probably is a list of this kind of thing already. Now al we need is the people who can do it, for free, in their spare time, and the hardware and software and maintenance they need. And coffee, lots of coffee, preferably with unlimited popcorn.

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One of the valuable things we can do is to keep Google and other commercial map providers straight; for instance we can give out structured access to our data so thst people can find new ways to use it outside one provider, and we can build a mapping community across the whole of the world and not only where it is profitable.

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That sounds similar to what umap or FacilMap already do, if I understand correctly.

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Things that OSM can do easily are things that a single person can build
and run for a while, and that can then grow and perhaps at some point be
incorporated into OSM proper - or continue to live as a separate but
related service. Success stories like that include various routing
engines, our geocoder, or Umap.

Things that are near impossible are things that require big project
management and/or funding. So, for example, it’s unlikely that we could
compete with Google on aerial imagery - a feature that many Google users
find very important. Providing aerial imagery on a resolution that can
match Google is hugely expensive.

Has there ever been a statement by “OSM leadership” that “we don’t want
to interfere with google” or that “our goal is to be the best map”?

We’re not a map, we’re a database (and a community that makes it), and
our web site is not intended to be the main place where OSM data is
consumed. This makes us very different from, say, Wikipedia, where the
web site is very central to using the data.

We concentrate on what we do best, but our open license means that
anyone who wants to make it their mission to kill Google Maps can take
our data and run with it.

I think there should be an open list of things that OSM has yet to
implement, to help focus effort on closing that gap, because I believe
an open collaborative cooperative service is just better for humanity
than one controlled by a single company.

We’re even better, not even our stuff is controlled by the same
organisation - the routing servers and all but the standard map style
featured on our web site are operated by third parties; the uMap service
that has already been pointed out to you is run by a third party, and so
on - it’s a whole ecosystem that is not managed or controlled by OSM(F).

So, it’s not going to be us who implements these things that will make
Google Maps go away, it’s third parties in an ecosystem in which we play
the role of providing data.

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To put it in crass economic terms, we’re in the business of commoditizing the (perceived) core of the Google Maps product.[1] We’re competing against the “old way” of doing business of defending a horde of proprietary data. But for many here, that would be at most a happy accident rather than the goal. Many of us have far more parochial or intangible motivations, and that’s plenty OK. If you put out a poll asking whether folks would be happy if Google were to switch to OSM data in a major country, you’d get a very diverse response. Some can’t wait for the day, others would experience an existential crisis, and still others would give you a profound meh.

This is a great way of framing one of the societal benefits of this project. And we’re not only reimagining where mapping is worthwhile, but also what is worth mapping. This point alone may not be a satisfactory answer to the original post, but take it as just one example of a broader strategy. When we’re up against not only Google but also the Google Habit, we can best establish ourselves as a credible alternative through asymmetric competition. Who says a map needs to be a one-size-fits-all solution? Why not innovate in alternative modes of transportation, or non-point-to-point navigation? How much would you expect Google to invest in an OpenHistoricalMap competitor? We should double down on efforts to compete on our terms.

We’ve had some notable successes on the margins. Many members of this community used to be prolific contributors to Google Map Maker, but we’ve outlasted a few iterations of their crowdsourcing efforts. I hope we can say the same about Google My Maps at some point. All too often, I see non-technical people chafe at the arbitrary limitations of that product. Entire online communities are centered around My Maps because they don’t know any better. Sooner or later, Google is going to do a “spring cleaning”, and OSM and our ecosystem will be ready to welcome their data with open arms.

  1. Perceived, as in, we’re definitely not commoditizing location-based product placement and ecosystem lock-in! ↩︎

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See… I wish when people visit openstreetmap for the first time they see a list of projects like FacilMap, and OrganicMaps right off the bat. I’m surprised I’m finding out they exist for the first time in a random forum thread. Something’s broke, and maybe it’s me but maybe not… Those should be listed on the main OSM homepage as if they’re different “view modes” and the default OSM view mode is just another view mode. Frankly I like things with more layers to them that I can turn on and off as needed. OSM’s Edit mode is excellent imho, but overkill for the average user just wanting to view.

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I see your point, but I suppose part of the problem would be deciding what to list. Just thinking about apps and websites I personally use that use OSM data in some way, they include umap, waymarkedtrails.org, Organic Maps, OSMAnd, Oruxmaps with OpenAndroMaps, TrailRouter, CityStrides, Wandrer.earth, Strava, and Wikiloc. If you include all of them, the list would be too long to read and you’d be back in the same position.

Is your overall idea that OSM as a project would promote or encourage a small number of applications (by implication discouraging other projects that people might want to develop)?

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Google, and others. That’s why they came up with Overture - reeling in the OSM community to work for the corporations. I have a feeling this iteration won’t work either, can’t be sure though.

I like the idea of a “presentation layer” around the OSM core database, or maybe a few variants, freeing regular data consumers from the need to each perform their own data cleaning.
(I used to operate databases, and was often asked to provide clear and precise reports from messy data, which almost always required such a layer).

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I see your point, but I suppose part of the problem would be deciding what to list. Just thinking about apps and websites I personally use that use OSM data in some way, they include umap, waymarkedtrails.org, Organic Maps, OSMAnd, Oruxmaps with OpenAndroMaps, TrailRouter, CityStrides, Wandrer.earth, Strava, and Wikiloc. If you include all of them, the list would be too long to read and you’d be back in the same position.

they could be all listed in a settings menu, ordered by type of service, and users could choose which should be shown on their personal map screen.

We have quite exhaustive information about many many third party offerings in the wiki, but occasional visitors to the site do not become aware of them.

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I’ve long time pointed out the difficulties, if not the quagmire, trying to compete directly with google would get us in to, but that has already all been said here. I would note that while Overture (aka the Linux Foundation) implied exactly that to get press coverage when they launched, that is not something that they are actually doing either.

But the one thing we could improve is communicating what openstreetmap.org is intended for, right now we don’t even do it badly, we don’t do it at all. Which for the last two decades has led to continuos friction with well meaning users that are surprised that when asking for some obviously missing feature they find out that this is not supposed to be a google competitor.

This isn’t a new observation but it isn’t clear to me why we’ve never been able to address the issue at all, I kind of have the suspicion that everybody is afraid of jinxing OSM 20 year long success story by changing something. But I can’t seriously see why changing the welcome popup and the about page to be a bit clearer on the subject (and maybe add a “Powered by OpenStreetMap” link/page somewhere) would break anything.

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remind me about Document design goals · Issue #1038 · openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website · GitHub that I opened in 2015.

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I think OSM should not want to compete directly to Google Maps. Its a geodatabase where others can create their own service. Why do i write? Because nobody has mentioned two services that are kinda trying to compete with google maps:

As for the communication part:
Yeah, i agree and i still think https://openstreetmap.org should NOT point directly to a map but to a explanation site like “Who are we” and “What do we do” but with a big Link to “I want to get to the map” and link to https://map.openstreetmap.org or something like that.

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I think OSM should not want to compete directly to Google Maps. Its a geodatabase where others can create their own service

also looking only on the map, google maps is made to follow a blue line, after which you might not even be able to return without again following a blue line, while our maps tries to make you understand your surroundings. They show the bare minimum while we are optimizing the map to show the maximum.

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? (I know, that’s shorter than 10 characters)

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As said above, I don’t think we should compete with Google Maps. I guess the reason most of us are contributing to OSM because we enjoy the work and making the world a better place. We should focus on the strengths of OSM instead. OSM is filling some gaps that Google Maps doesn’t do very well on. One area is maps for hiking, where Google Maps is often useless because it’s too much focussed on car traffic. Almost all hiking apps use OSM data; I don’t know a single one based on Google Maps. A few other areas are mentioned in this article Finding the ‘invisible’ millions who are not on maps which has been a great inspiration for me to contribute to OSM. We should focus on providing frequently updated map data where there is no commercial interest for Google Maps to provide them. Google Maps is very strong in routing in urban areas because they use the location and speed of android users to propose the best route. OSM and its data users will never be able to outcompete that. Instead, we should focus on providing routing information in rural areas, where it is not the amount of traffic, but the road quality that is crucial for optimising routing. OSM provides this data (surface=* and especially smoothness=*), Google doesn’t. These data can also be used by authorities in planning their road maintenance work.

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