Month: January 2018

Why Google Maps is years ahead of the competition

Justin O’Beirne, former head of cartography at Apple, explains why Google Maps has a multiple year advantage on the competition.

Basically, it’s about the structures/building footprints Google can display thanks to their satellite imagery and Street View efforts. Nobody else has this level of precision.

Bye Apple Maps!

1 1+ +Childhood+Neighborhood

Here’s another example:

[Source: Google Maps’s Moat]

Stop reading what Facebook tells you to read

Foster Kramer wrote a hell of a piece explaining why we ought not to trust Facebook with the stories we see appearing on the newsfeed. Here are two tidbits but please read the whole thing:

And as smart as you think the people who run Facebook are, trust us when we tell you that they are far, far, far smarter than you could imagine (and if not the people, then definitelythose algorithms). 

They understand human psychology to a stunning degree, which is how they’ve been able to capitalize on it for the last few years. It’s why Facebook is filled, mostly, with the things you agree with, or are seemingly helpless against clicking on. But because you’re a human being, something about it probably rubs you the wrong way. As it should! You’re a human, and not a hamster doing a stupid pet trick, which is what Facebook has turned both readers and publishers into. Credit where it’s due: They’re that good. And yeah, fake news is a problem—but before we learned about it being a problem, where Facebook was concerned, it was a feature.

And

So! Facebook created the newsfeed, and then turned to publishers/media outlets, and said: Guess what? Everyone’s on Facebook. You want a piece of the action? You’re gonna play ball with us. You’ll put share buttons on all of your stories. You’ll participate in our Facebook Instant Articles program. You’ll advertise with us! When we tell you that we’re going to start promoting video over articles, you’re going to start making video. And then when we tell you what kind of video, you’ll make that video too! And if you don’t want to play ball, fine. Your competition will.

[Source: The 2018 internet resolution everyone should have: Bring back your browser bar]

The Hardest Workers Don’t Do the Best Work

At the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil, the U.S. midfielder Michael Bradley put up a statistic that wowed folks back home: He ran further than anyone else. Through three games, Bradley had covered a total of 23.4 miles, according to a micro-transmitter embedded in his cleat, while his team finished tops among nations in “work rate,” a simple measure of movement per minute otherwise known as running around.

Left unmentioned was the fact that the lowest work rate of the tournament by a non-defender was recorded by its most valuable player, Argentine goal machine Lionel Messi.

Yup, work smart, not hard. 

[Source: The Hardest Workers Don’t Do the Best Work – Bloomberg]