Sky King 36

I think you guys are being too optimistic about what the cost increase would be if GS were to start offering a tiered mapping plan. Let's assume that GS creates a new "Premium Plus" membership level that includes Google maps. The problem is that GS loses much of their negotiating power. Sure, at 2,000,000 map tiles per day, you may have the negotiating power to push Google down to $2. But... Don't forget, all the basic members... they won't be using Google tiles. All the Premium members that opt out... they won't be using Google tiles. The lion's share of the volume will be gone and you'll be negotiating with less volume. So to use your numbers, it may be an 80 USD hike, not 40 USD. And think about it... given a choice between paying 80 USD a year more (110 USD/year total) or simply using Firefox, Chrome, or Opera as your browser so you can use the free workaround... How many people would pay the $80? Not enough to justify the development costs of a "premium plus" membership model. And what happens when 3 weeks from now, someone has ported the greasemonkey script into an ie7pro script, and all 5 major browsers have a free workaround? Nothing in product development is as simple as "a few guys said they'll buy it, so we should go ahead."

This isn't cancer research, there's nothing of any real consequence here. Before we start using words like "unforgivable" let's reflect for a moment that this whole thing is about finding little pieces of plastic and metal in the woods or under lamp skirts. No one's going to die from a misstep here, so in that context, all is forgivable. On a scale of 1 to 10, I reserve angst levels above 4 for those times when I am parachuting out of a helicopter, at night, with tracers coming up at me. This map debacle has taken me all the way from 1.0 to 1.5 on my meter-o-angst.

I try, when I can to be a voice of moderation and not just be a hater. I don't blame Google... Collecting all the data, negotiating all the licenses, and then building the infrastructure to serve up tiles in near real-time on a global scale... You are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. They give it almost all of it away for free, and only charge a fee when one of their users is using their maps to generate revenue. What more could we ask of Google? I don't blame Groundspeak, per se. Some of you guys just rail on them because you think they are squandering the many millions of profit they are making. Again, they give 90% of their services away for free, they charge a tiny price to those of us that are premium members... Someone tossed around the 100,000 PM's number as having been validated last year... not sure if that's true, but if it is, it means they have 3 million in annual membership revenue before advertising and merchandise. What that means is that they have razor thin margins to work with. People here often accuse them of misappropriating their mountains of profit. They get a lot done for the revenue they have. And they give away almost everything for free, they generate revenue of a really tiny segment of their services--just like Google. It is totally unfair to give them the smack-down they sometimes get. BUT Where Groundspeak gets frustrating for all of us is that they seem to have a never-ending string of technical and marketing miscalculations. I have to say that the API was an absolute winner. They did correctly predict the future prominence of the PDA in caching and making the API a top priority was absolutely spot-on tactically. But beyond that... Remember rolling out J-Query-based web pages before realizing that it will break the tens of millions of existing logs? Remember the first feedback website? Last week was, as has just been said, just another in a long line of technical AND business miscalculations. So many of the website and app revisions have just left me, and so many others, scratching our heads. I have a unique vantage point on all this... I have been the CEO of two venture-backed startups, and it was tough, grueling work, in many ways harder than my experiences as a soldier. I am currently a contract CIO and infrastructure consultant for large enterprises undergoing major IT transformation. So I truly DO get it, I get how hard it is. I have been in their shoes many times. If it was so easy, I wouldn't have had the consulting opportunities I've had over the last decade. People pay me to help them because it is just plain difficult. Here's my theory, as someone whose been through it... The real downfall, the real turning point, to me, was the first feedback site a couple of years ago. (The GetSatisfaction one.) At the beginning of that, ALL of the lackeys, and especially Jeremy, were so actively involved. They were always present, lots of feedback, lots of discussion... But it all started to change. You could just see it, feel it, it was palpable when the real chafing started. For the first time, they really "opened the front door" and let the voice of the customer base come in... and it was too much. Too many ideas, too much criticism, too much everything. As an entrepreneur, you come to this crossroads... Either my original vision is going to be the locomotive--the driving force and the guiding principle that steers the business... Or, I will yield to my customers and let them steer my business, I will let go of the wheel and let the tide of the market wash through my lobby and take over my business. That crossroads is the single most difficult part of any entrepreneur's progression, and the teething pains it has caused for them, and for us, have become monumental. There's a reason why venture capital firms really struggle with whether to leave a founder in place and exploit his passion, or replace him/her with a dispassionate management team better prepared to evolve and grow the business. To me, our relationship with GS--all of us--seemed to change a few months into that first feedback site. Groundspeak started to pull away in a palpable, tangible way that you could see and feel... and our criticism--some unfair, some not--got harsher and harsher. The abyss between "them" and "us" just seems like a monumental chasm today. We don't feel like they listen, they don't feel like we understand. It all makes me wish I could just spend a day in Seattle and offer some free consulting.

I am assuming you are talking about Groundspeak's Geocaching app, on an android? If you purchased the app through the android market, no, you do not need to repurchase. The android market uses your google identity as an "account" that keeps track of whatever you have purchased. When you go into the new phone's settings, if you enter in the same google account (usually your gmail address, but not always) that was in the old phone, then any apps you purchased can just be downloaded again like you did before, at no cost to you. The market remembers that you already paid for it.

I have more tools than I have mental bandwidth. Between the blackberry, android, laptop... I have tried a lot of software, hardware... my advice would be to keep the list as small as possible. Far better to have 2 or 3 tools you are really an expert at than 5 or 6 tools where your knowledge doesn't go as deep.

Mine have been coming through all day.

Naw... I have tried that one, it cleans up all the sections of the code that apply to firefox, but the top part that is for Chrome and Opera still remains a solid block od surly javascript.

Grrrrr, I really wanted to make some edits on the Chrome-compatible version of the plugin, but alas it is one of those plugins where the other has compressed it down to one single really gigantic, never ending line of javascript. Tried js beautifier but not even they could decipher it, LOL.

For zoom levels, here in the part of the US we are in, the max zoom levels available are: Google Street = 22 Google Hybrid = 21 Google Aerial = 21 Google Terrain = 22 For most of Europe Eniro will go to 22

Firefox is simply another browser, the program you use to surf web pages. If you are a windows user you are probably using Internet Explorer, if you are a Mac user, probably Safari. But there are several very well known, and a few lesser known alternative browsers. Firefox is the most popular of these. The other two fairly popular ones would be Chrome (written by Google) and Opera. Some browsers (especially firefox) allow the concept of plug-ins or extensions... Tiny little programs that you can add on to that browser to do something useful or interesting. One of these plug-ins for Firefox is called Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a scripting plug-in that allows people to write very robust scripts that interact with any webpage that is loaded by that browser. Greasemonkey could, for instance, over-ride font sizes if you were a person with vision limitations. What someone has done is created a greasemonkey script that over-rides the built-in map sources that are embedded in the Groundspeak web page. Hope this helps.

The other upside of using the "My Finds" query is that you will be up against the 1,000 cache-per-PQ limit fairly soon since you are already in the 800s. The My Finds query is not count limited.

I had switched off of Firefox and over to Chrome because the sync of not just book marks but history, etc. across multiple computers was a killer app for me. I will continue to use Chrome as my default browser, but the moment I saw this script I flew like the wind to update to the latest FF 10 and greasemonkey. BTW, in many parts of the world, google and bing offer greater zoom levels that the defaults, you can manually edit the max zoom levels in the greasemonkey script. I just downloaded the greasemonkey less than a half hour ago and I have already doctored my own up by removing all the Eniro related code, editing the max zoom levels on google and bing, and then adding in 6 of my own super secret map sources. This is pretty much the coolest thing since the wheel.

Google Chrome has some limited native support for many types of greasemonkey scripts. I tested this script in Chrome and it doesn't work.

Sweet mother of all that is good! This is amazing. This approach, client-side acquisition of tiles, is not revenue bearing and thus should not be in violation if the Google and Bing ToS. Well done.

For the past few years I have just done screen captures (I use OneNote's but there are a variety of free standalone utilities, as well as plugins for chrome, Evernote, etc) and just print the screen cap.

Most people are probably not aware of the Mapquest/OSM partnership that was formed a year or two ago. Gathering the underlying data required to build and maintain maps on a global scale is crazy expensive. It requires a staggering commitment of money, time, resources, licensing... it is mind boggling how much a company like google has to invest to make streetview a reality, for instance. AOL, who owns Mapquest, has been exploring the idea of getting out of that part of the business by making OSM their underlying map. They found that the OSM maps weren't up to a level they needed yet, so they made some major investments in OSM, and sponsor a number of large projects meant to improve the quality and quantity of OSM map data. The goal is that over the next few years, the OSM maps evolve into such a level of completeness that they will at some point surpass the existing Mapquest sources, at which time Mapquest will switch over. I think Mapquest has accepted that there's no future in competing with Bing or Google as commercial map content creators, both of those companies probably spend more in annual parking lot maintenance alone than Mapquest's total revenue.

I actually use the G2 pretty much exclusively, but I use the ultra-fine 0.38 which is nice for nanos, etc. Most people find 0.38 a little too fine for day-to-day writing and use the 0.5 or 0.7. I use the 0.5 for day-to-day writing. They also have a big fat 1.0. Mitragorz, I find my G2 0.38s and the 0.5s are regular stock items in the stationery/school supply aisles at Target. YMMV as the stock items at SuperTargets, Target Greatlands, and regular Targets aren't identical.

"You can't afford to give me millions of dollars of free stuff that I never pay for, and therefore, you are greedy"??? I am not a big fan of Groundspeak's decisions over the past few years, it seems like a stream of epic miscalculations. I am not that big a fan of Google either... But any attempt on either of their parts to make a responsible profit by charging money for ANYTHING is met with resentment. Somehow we got this idea that the words "delivered online" is a synonym for "must be really inexpensive to make." Even on the android market, people are absolutely thrashed with criticism when they charge 99 cents for a really refined app.

I do agree that it is best to think of cachers in "strata" and not as one big bunch of homogeneous users (OBBOHU?) I tend to think of cachers falling into one of six categories: Occasional Urban Occasional Hybrid Occasional Wilderness Fanatic Urban Fanatic Hybrid Fanatic Wilderness No one set of tools, no one style of cache, no one kind of map, no one kind of GPS will probably appeal to all of these. I get so tired of how judgmental people get about the ways in which others enjoy caching. How many thousands of "why in the **** would you ever need that?" posts have there been in these and the feedback forums. I am so disappointed with how many times someone says "I could really use a tool that does X" and the response they get is simply a watered-down form of "I don't understand why you'd need that, there must be something wrong with you." If you are an occasional urban cacher, then almost nothing I do--the way I use GSAK, the way I use PQs, the way I use maps online--none of it will make any sense to you at all. We could just as well be on different planets. And maybe therein lies the very core of the problems so many of us avid cachers have had with updates over the past few years. I feel like every time I use any Groundspeak product--whether it's their app or the website--I end up thinking to myself, "these guys just don't understand me. They don't understand how I cache, how I use information, how I plan, how I log... they just don't get ME." I have said this before, I feel like the website is designed by people who are familiar with caching, not by people who are avid cachers.

I wouldn't read TOO much into this, he was never what most of us would call an "active" cacher... his busiest year he averaged under 7 caches per month.

I agree with some of your points, but not sure about this one. As PMs we have access to some serious tool firepower that makes us less reliant on the map API. The tools I use that reduce my reliance on the GC maps, are PQs, and NeonGeo. Basic members don't have access to PQs and their use of any mobile tool, like NeonGeo, is quite limited. Originally I was a GSAK-centric cacher, my geocaching revolved around PQs imported into GSAK. More recently I have become a very NeonGeo-centric cacher. I was still using the GC map view as my primary "day planning" tool, but for now it is unusable for me so I have become a heavy user of the GSAK google maps plugin again.

Ironically... google premier pricing applies to web sites that charge for access. Think about that... people have been proposing that Groundspeak only provide google maps for premium members. In actuality, the opposite is true. That is, GS could offer google maps to basic members and force only its premium members to suffer through the new maps. Sooooo, here's a thought, let's name it the "Sky King Maneuver" in case it takes off, so that I can get credit for it... (A take-off on Star Trek's "corbamite maneuver") Consider a bifurcated web server. When you log in to geocaching.com, we all go to the same place. Same features, same URLs... But once you click on a map link of any kind... Then we go two places: Basic members go to http://www.geocaching.com/map/default.aspx?xxxxxxxx Premium members go to http://premium.geocaching.com/map/default.aspx?xxxxxxx See where I am going with this? By taking the massive free traffic and separating it from the much smaller number of us that are "premies", you move a huge block of the traffic into the base google API. Only premium traffic would incur any fee structure because google does not require premier for free public access web sites. Free memberships stay free, premium memberships maybe go up to $35, and we're all happy again.

I am an avid wilderness hiker/climber, and a "has been" special operations soldier, so granted, I am maybe better equipped, experience-wise... But for me, there is something that some of you will immediately understand, and some won't... you either feel it in your bones, or you don't and if you don't, there's no explaining it. And that is... That there is something invigorating, almost spiritual that happens to me when I am out in the brush, on my own, with as few external dependencies as possible. Yesterday I was out in a swampy area, just me, a light daypack, my favorite hiking boots, and my GPS. I encountered trees I had to climb, creeks I had to cross, forks in the paths I had to choose. I stepped on a sharp object that penetrated the bottom of my boot, but luckily, not my foot. I had my trusty leatherman with me and as able to extract the object because I couldn't get it out by hand. Most would be annoyed by such things... for me, they are part of the fun, and knowing that I have all the physical and mental tools with me IS the fun. And it was a little slice of heaven on earth for me. There is something about being on your own, a one-to-one relationship between man and nature, out doing my thing and solving problems and overcoming obstacles. It is the culmination of experience, instinct, preparation, awareness, and tool selection, that all comes together. Everything I carry in my pack is there because 30 years of outdoor experience has told me that it is just the right tool, the right compromise between weight, function, probability of need, and flexibility of purpose. What geocaching brings to me is a goal, an incentive, a reason to press on and have to make decisions and craft tools and solve problems along the way. It is not about "adventure" per se, it is not about the thrill of the risk of falling off a cliff. It is something else, it's about self-reliance, self accomplishment.

I've had roughly 30 LEO interactions. I think it depends a lot on how you cache--namely, where and when. I tend to cache in places, and at times, that arouse curiosity. So far all of those interactions have been very positive, no troubles yet. My favorite was a Lynn County (Iowa) deputy who noticed my car in a county park after closing a couple of years ago. (OK, I admit, I can be a little irreverent about rules). So, he gets on the radio and tells his wingman "It's OK, I just talked to the guy and he is doing that geocrapping." To this day some of my friends still call me a geocrapper. A sad coincidence--the following night, a Lynn County deputy, Mark Taylor (who may very well have been the guy he was talking to on the radio) died in a traffic accident. I placed the memorial cache "Mark Taylor Tribute" at the exact location the car came to rest.

He got a promotion. Geocaching.com hits are unwanted, non-revenue bearing hits. We need to understand how and why google, bing, whoever, actually make money by selling mapping. Let's say I am google... If you use my maps via MY website, it gives me a chance to collect info about you, it lets me pop banner ads... These are things advertisers (my customers) are willing to pay for. This is the very essence of the google model... I give you something for free, and I sell information about your use of it to a third party for enough money that it pays for your service. So... if you access my map server via geocaching.com, that is no good for me, it is a financial loss. I can't generate any revenue by selling your location, because my advertisers know that by virtue of the way the tile was called up, you probably aren't actually there at that location. In other words, I did all the work to render, store, and deliver the map tile to you and I get nothing, bupkiss, nada in return. I have costs, but no revenue. OK, so, what if you use your iPhone or android as a GPS while you are out driving around... the Google ToS doesn't allow me to collect your route info and sell it to others. BUT I am very, very sneaky... if I let you use my tile server as the background map while you are out driving around--that is different. That IS information that I can collect, and can sell for a very nice premium to others. If I can figure out how to link your identity to your location and travel habits, and do it without having to ask for your tacit approval... That is an absolute goldmine, and it is a revenue source that generates HUGE revenues for google. I can't track your movements but I CAN, and DO, track each and every tile request and sell THAT information to my customers, because that implies your location. OK... so... What if you are driving around town, but, you are using a navigation app on your phone that knows how to cache tiles in memory and redisplay them if you drive back into that area? Nooo! That's no good, remember, the people paying for you to have access to that map tile are paying good $ to know where you are, and if you pull the tile out of your device cache, the customers won't have anyway of knowing where you are... I NEED the tile request, it is how I track your whereabouts without your permission. This is why tile storage in any form is a violation of the ToS of map servers like Google and Bing. I hope this explains why standalone web pages (like gc.com) and standalone apps (like locus, Groundspeak, etc.) are the absolute enemy of tile server providers like Google and Bing. Google is in the business of providing you online services that allow them to track your actions and movements in a way that are valuable enough that others are willing to pay them for the information. Read the ToS for gmail, or google voice... The explicitly tell you that they DO mine your e-mails and voicemails for information about you. The "magic" of google is that they provide free services that are useful enough that people are willing to abandon their privacy concerns in order to get them for free. Our appetite for free stuff online has become a sea change in our society that no one besides google saw coming.