Nationalizing Maps & Our Nations Right to Find Nearby Ice Cream
So, I haven’t watched CNBC in quite some time, but I was getting bored on the treadmill the other morning and gave it a whirl (I think it’s time for some new tunes for my iPhone!) and the big fuss was all about whether or not the U.S. government will be nationalizing some of our nations largest banks.
Then a few days later I open up an email about a Directions Magazine article about how a town is nationalizing its mapmaking. The town of Johannesburg is taking matters into its own hands and embarking on an aggressive project looking to create its own LIS (land information system) to create a centralized and comprehensive resource to service its citizens improving “deliveries to their properties, response time of emergency services and delivery of council services.”
Now I am not a fan of nationalizing stuff in general, whether maps or banks, but it did get me thinking again about the experience of finding things via digital maps and how we are not where we need to be here in the U.S.
Mike Blumenthal had an interesting post on his blog a couple of days ago pointing out just such an example. It seems that a bunch of nefarious pirates have hijacked the business listings that are later used in places like Google Maps or your cell phone providers 411 services, and have inserted hundreds if not thousands of bogus business listings for locksmiths. When an un suspecting customer calls one of the bogus businesses, lets just say that when they arrive the business practices are not always above board.
His post reminded me of my experience trying to use a variety of LBS apps on my iPhone to find an ice cream parlor the other day, while nothing nefarious happened, it was just plain lousy. We bribed my two sons that if they were well behaved at a “grown up dinner” at a Korean BBQ restaurant that we’d treat them to ice cream… so upon leaving the restaurant I of course expected finding a nearby ice cream place should take all of 20 seconds on busy 34th street in midtown Manhattan, armed with a half dozen or so location/finding apps that I’d dutifuly installed on my iPhone.
I was wrong. I ended up using Google which sent us on a wild goose chase throughout Macy’s, but quickly tried a few others and here is a sampling of the advice I was offered by the location aware applications I looked at:
Google Maps (results: probably the best of the weak lot, but still sent us on wild goose chase around Macy’s and not very consistent with providing good information on businesses)
- Empire Ice Cream (presumably at top of empire state building? I didn’t see it on the ground floor and the security guy had no idea, but the link from Google was to their health inspector page where they had 4 points violation last May so we decided not to find out.)
- Three different Baskin Robbins locations
- Emack & Bolio’s which 20 minutes, and 10 escalator rides later we discovered didn’t exist, but there was a Ben & Jerry’s on the fourth floor deep inside the massive Macy’s store.
Yelp (result: not bad but one listing was not even a retail store, one store was closed and Yelp missed a number of places that were closer)
- Pinkberry
- La Salle
- Crazy Bananas
- Silhouette Brands (not a retail store)
- Tasti DeLite (currently closed)
Loopt (result was bad, 3 of the 5 were not ice cream places at all, and closer ice cream places were not shown)
- Rare (a steak and burger place)
- Murray Hill Market (grocery/bodega)
- Crazy Bananas
- Subtle Tea (a tea room)
- Pinkberry
Limbo (results were bad: two were not particularly close, one was maybe 100 floors up, two didn’t exist)
- Carvel (didn’t exist)
- La Salle
- Emack & Bolio (see above)
- Cremalita (23+ blocks away)
AroundMe (in hindsight didn’t give bad results, but at the time I couldn’t find ice cream as an option and it said that it thought I was in Weehawken, NJ, so I quickly moved on)
- Three Baskin Robbins
- Empire Ice Cream
- Carvel (doesn’t exist)
Where Application powered by yellowpages.com (result was bad, 3 of the 5 not ice cream places at all)
- Baskin Robbins
- Secret Harbor Bistro (an Aremenian Restaurant??!)
- Pasqua Coffee Bar
- Crazy Banana’s
- Jamba juice
UrbanSpoon couldn’t seem to search by both keyword and proximity. It could tell where I was and give me nearby restaurants, but when drilling down with a search for ice cream I got results from all over Manhattan.
Now I don’t suspect that the government would do a better job of tracking all the ice cream places around me, there would probably be 18 months of hearings just to define exactly what ice cream is and the fro-yo, ice milk and Jamba Juice lobbyist would all get to wield their influence. But c’mon private enterprise, when I search for ice cream on one of these things I do want nearby retail stores where I can stroll in and buy ice cream for my kids, and I don’t want steak restaurants or coffee bars or tea rooms or to hop in a cab to the “nearest” ice cream store 23 blocks away only to see a Crazy Banana’s flying by five blocks later.
