Google recently announced its Map Maker tool, (in the words of OSM) “a kind of faux Open Street Map.” On the surface, the idea is clear–have users make contributions, as they know local geography better than anybody else. An excerpt from the OSM blog post today:

Like Knol, the mooted ‘wikipedia killer’, Google refuse to acknowledge existing communities, trample on their hard work and lack the mindset to engage with an open project.

But, this really doesn’t matter.

What’s fascinating is that they haven’t set themselves up against OpenStreetMap so much but rather TeleAtlas/TomTom, NAVTEQ/Nokia and AND. This is really a swipe at things like TomTom’s MapShare(TM) and ANDs Map 2.0. The question is now going to be, when do they switch on editing of existing data markets, if at all? Only those with intimate knowledge of the contracts will know.

The fundamental reasons for OpenStreetMap remain intact and if anything are now stronger. At first glance it sounds like OpenStreetMap, until you realise that Google own that data you give them, there’s no community and you are unlikely to see use of the data in ‘creative, productive, or unexpected ways’.

The pattern with Google is by now well-understood. Given their massive scale, subsidizing such efforts is trivial. Gmail, Google Apps and other products follow this model. It won’t have any kind of material impact in the immediate future, and that’s why the US airline industry ignored jetBlue. Whoops.

Umibot’s not preaching conspiratorial here–what Google is doing is great for satisficing the masses–much of the nuance is lost, but in return millions of users get something they can use. Of course they don’t own that contribution and Google (and of course others exist) is able to build out more page views, resulting in more advertising, more revenue, and so on…

Urban Mapping now finds its first customer competing against our first product. It isn’t that Google can do neighborhoods ‘better’ than UMI (or anybody else), it’s the idea that Google doesn’t need anybody else to do it for them. In fact, they don’t need to do it themselves–throw it over to a fanatical user base, and watch them diligently work away, and allow the new Microsoft to reap the rewards. If Umibot were a thinking human, no doubt it would be saying “these guys are smart.”

Ok, not the best tile for this post, but it is relevant. Great article in Harvard Design Magazine by Daniela Fabricius about informally-defined spaces in Rio de Janeiro. Favelas are not quite slums in the traditional sense, but they have great significance: it is estimated that 31% of all urban dwellers reside in informally-defined regions, 98% of favellas are electrified and many have private bus lines. We’re not referring to the Dulles, Virginias of the world, but the hardcore urban areas that are ignored by the surrounding (legally-incorporated) authority.

From the article:

How do these favela islands form? Unlike the planned development of a city or suburb, in which infrastructures—roads, pipes, electrical lines —create a grid for houses and people to fill, the favela develops in reverse. The infrastructures do not officially come until much later, when the favela is urbanized and partially absorbed by the city. First the people come and build their houses; then roads evolve; electricity and water are pirated in. The infrastructure develops with the houses, one connection at a time. A community forms. Each favela, however small, gives itself a name: Kinder Ovo (named after the chocolate, Kinder Ei), Salsa y Merenge (a telenovela), Raio do Sol (ray of sun), Babilônia, Shangri-lá, Formiga (anthill), Telégrafos (where Brazil’s first telegraph network started). The favela begins to operate like a small town or city, with a local community association that takes on functions that would otherwise be those of the government: mail distribution, cable TV, land deeds, political representation, arbitration, security, public works, etc.

How these “towns” develop can be seen in a study of two neighborhoods, Providência and Rocinha, which differ in scale and history but share significant qualities such as easy visibility and proximity to the city center. The location of these favelas next to affluent and busy areas makes them particularly relevant examples of the island effect of favelas as heterogeneous zones within the urban continuum. What is also notable is the strong identity of these favelas as communities and places with histories and qualities distinct from those of the rest of the city. But they are still regarded as alien presences and suffer from the violence and stigma of exclusion and invisibility.

These areas exist in many areas of the lesser-developed world: the mega-slum in Mumbai, Mexico City, Pakistan, China and elsewhere.

Great story in today’s New York Times about maintenance/repair issues with subway elevators in the New York City Transit system. Umibot finds this interesting because it draws attention to the hidden world of attribute data. While spatial elements (station points, entrances, routes, etc…) are valuable, attribute data allow users to act on information–hours of operation, are elevators in operation (today), real-time scheduling/routing, parking facilities, etc…Last week we announced our mass transit initiative, and lots more about that coming soon…

Great Flash graphic showing elevator entrapments and downtime.

On Day Two of the Kelsey Group’s DDL conference here in Seattle, Zillow’s Rich Barton gave a keynote address about his three Big Ideas where information asymmetry presents significant opportunity for business model disruption: travel, legal services and real estate, or as he says, “storming the Bastille.” Umibot knows that Rich has obviously proven himself as a successful entrepreneur but wants to clarify a few points he made (and I thank my master for giving me my AI that allowed me to ‘know’ this).

Zillow’s neighborhood database has 7,000 neighborhoods covering approximately 150 US cities.

UMI’s neighborhood boundary database contains almost 40,000 neighborhoods across 1,200 towns and cities in the US (plus additional Canadian and European coverage), and we continue to add additional neighborhood coverage on a regular basis.

Rich said Zillow’s neighborhood boundary data is available via an API. I believe he misspoke. Certainly Zillow offers an API, but I don’t believe it offers neighborhood boundary data (although this could certainly be done).

UMI offers a fully robust API, allowing us to offer neighborhood-level geocoding via web services using REST.

Zillow’s boundaries are generally drawn around census tracts and postal codes

UMI’s neighborhood boundaries conform to how users (not direct marketers or actuaries) understand neighborhoods–postal codes and other administrative/political boundaries bear little relationship to neighborhoods, as this search reveals.

There’s more to this story, but the above is probably enough for the non-obsessed to chew on.

Umibot recently caught up with a few favorite blogs, including the -ist family. In not so unbelievable, yet simultaneously incredible fashion, here is the change of service announcement from hell.

Umibot may not be human, but he still understands that too many facts in too short a space equals too much confusion….Information anxiety, for sure. Stay tuned for UMI’s Urbanware Transit product–a fully robust and highly-structured database of mass transit systems.

Thanks Gothamist

Umibot loves reading about the lore and luster of railways, especially if it involves urban transit. Great post this week about some secrets of Grand Central Terminal.

Tonight is the first (annual? monthly?) UMI Code Jam. Tim, Nino and Ted have been blazing for the past six hours and Rebecca and Ian have been there for moral support. If Umibot drank coffee, he’d be chugging it about now.

We’re closing in on a full-color RESTful API and hope to (formally) announce it very soon…

Umibot picked up some news on his neural net late in the day…

Ends up that UMI placed third out of 500+ websites in latency. Our home page loaded in 7.639ms compared with 1800ms for Amazon.com. That means UMI is 250x faster than Amazon’s servers! Yes, and no. It’s an interesting test, but not especially meaningful as it may be a factor more of colo facility and HTMLness than anything else. Some thoughts from Rich Skrenta, who authored the post:

Making a leap here… This means that people’s well-trained subliminal neural hardware is deciding whether to click Back even before they’ve consciously realized what they’re looking at…cool.

I’d recommend the following performance yardstick for server latency:

50ms = pretty good

250ms = ave/sluggish, but still OK

500ms = your site is slow as molasses

Faster is always better, but if you’re in the 50-100ms range you can feel pretty good about your platform. Over that, and there’s probably some easy wins to be had, which will payoff in user satisfaction and a lower hardware ramp in the co-lo.

So how does the rest of the net stack up?

The following list is the result of running apachebench on 530 Web 2.0 sites pulled from CrunchBase. I also added some of the major sites such as Google, Yahoo, and so forth for comparison.

Technical issues in the past 12 hours have impacted UMI’s public face, but rest-assured, everything is working under the hood!

Since Umibot is continuously searching the web for new & notable for all things geo, here’s one of note…The Republic of Ireland is going postal! Or, more accurately, An Post (national post system), will introduce a national postcode system “sooner rather than later.”

Dublin has had a postcode system since the 1960s but not committed itself to a national postcode system until last year.

It will be interesting to note how administrative delineations emerge; as Umibot knows, ZIP codes aren’t all that useful in the US for policymaking–they are are defined based on a mail carriers’ route, and in fact are not even self-contained areas, yet they persist for direct marketing purposes despite obvious shortcomings. The history of the Zone Improvement Program is a curious one. We’ve also written about the ‘ZIP code fallacy’ on this blog.