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While I get your point, I don't think it's very productive.

The majority of the people who interact with OSM will get a perception of it that's biased by the presentation. Even with the MapQuest Open style, Google Maps, to me, are far more pleasant to look at and easier to understand. The text seems to be rendered in a better, more readable way, and GMaps has a better handle on decreasing contrast for things that aren't that important, allowing more important features to stand out.

You can tell me that I shouldn't care, because you provide such awesome data, and I'm tempted to agree, but my reptilian brain will give me opposite feelings every time I try to look at your maps.

3 comments

I'm not sure how you define 'productive' in this sense. OpenStreetMap provides data for people to make maps with. What you do with that data is (gloriously) up to you.

OSM doesn't have to "sell" their maps. It's the folks like Telenav that need to make their maps look better.

'productive' parsed for me as 'beneficial to the project'; OSM doesn't have to do anything. Notably, they don't have to garner any usage or mindshare.

OSM doesn't have to "sell" their maps. It's the folks like Telenav that need to make their maps look better.

They certainly do if "I’d like it to get OSM to seven billion contributors in the next year or two"

With a world population of seven billion, that seems a little ambitious...

This is GNU/Linux/Ubuntu disambiguation and customer support problem.

There needs to be separate organizations to package and distribute this data and make apps for it. (A web map project will have different needs than an offline phone navigation app. OSM shouldn't try to gain/maintain domain expertise in everything.)

Let's try another example: do you use foursquare and if so how do you feel about its maps?

I think its a good example of data > render, with ux in the front of mind. Unfortunately we are good at the read case, not as good at the contribute case.