Comment by al_borland
13 hours ago
> But, thankfully, they seem to have ended their partnership with Yelp.
I’m not so sure about this. Tapping around to some random businesses around me, I see photos being pulled in from Yelp, OpenTable, and Foursquare.
When I try to view the photos full screen, OpenTable and Foursquare images work seamlessly. Yelp prompts for an app download to jump me over to their world, which is a horrible user experience.
Friends don't let friends support Yelp. Hopefully that's all just cruft. Apple used to get things like open hours from Yelp, but now they have their own, complicated, Apple ID location that I never remember to update and have to go through typical Apple ID machinations to use.
I just opened maps and took a look. Kinda shocking to me that there doesn’t appear to be an obvious or easy way to add POI data. Google Maps is huge on promoting users to supply UGC.
Google also tries to show the impact of user-submitted POI info to help people feel good about it and encourage more submissions.
I submitted a few minor location edits to make the markers more accurate. Occasionally I’ll get an email telling me how often my new location change has been used. It’s not enough to be annoying, I’m always just shocked at the impact. Back in July I got an email that one of my updates was viewed 500k times, for a little boat rental shop on the Great Lakes. It had been really hard to find with the former location of the marker. Another one edit in a more populated area had 1.7m views.
I’ve only made 3 edits, but I can where feedback like this could get a person make map updates as a hobby, especially if the map data still needs a lot of work. One person with some free time could have a massive impact on the maps data in their community.