[Marble-devel] [OSM-dev] NOTICE: gazetteer.osm.org being retired

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 18:36, Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Jonathan Bennett
> <openstreetmap at jonno.cix.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>  On 01/09/2010 15:14, Torsten Rahn wrote:
>>>
>>> And I doubt that OSM contributors
>>> see openstreetmap.org as a  nice limited "Demo Version" of what a true
>>> Free
>>> Mapping portal could look like.
>>
>> Actually, that's precisely what I see it as.
>
> Well, Jonathan, I think you are wrong. In a recent user survey, the features
> that got the most number of votes were routing, adding a scale to the map,
> clickable PoIs and better searching. Apart from clickable PoIs, those are
> all features you will find on mainstream mapping sites.

Yes users want all those fancy features. But there's no reason why
they have to get them at openstreetmap.org, they can get them at
CloudMade, at MapQuest, or Bing Maps.

There's only a few people working on the OpenStreetMap web application
on and off, and those people are never going to come up with something
that's competetive on the user interface side to Google Maps et al. So
it's better if we focus on the data.

But as I've stated before the OSMF is its own worst enemy in this
regard, the people behind it insist (rightly) that we should be more
like kernel.org, but our frontpage is still 90% a giant map. So it
looks like we're trying to make a Google Maps clone.