Waze is like a hot girl with a charming personality who likes your favorite band and gets along with all of your friends and family... who also, inexplicably, has a third arm. This is soooo close to being the next big thing (which might explain why
Google shelled almost a billion dollars for it) that it makes you wonder why it has a few glaring errors.
Waze is an application for Android and iPhone that seeks to replace whatever app you're currently using to map and navigate your life. It has a great idea which is to add the user ability to add flags to the map, so if you should see a cop sitting in a speed trap you can throw this information up on the Waze map so that other Waze drivers will be aware. I use this example because I'm assuming that's the functionality people will use most, because I'm cynical, but you can also alert your fellow Wazers to other good to know information like construction sites, cars stalled on the side of the road, traffic jams, etc. This I loved about the app immediately because while, say, Google Maps will alert you to traffic, there is so much more going on while you are driving that would be nice to know before you get blind sided by it. I was immediately reminded of driving out of state to visit family decades ago and using a CB radio to get just this sort of information.
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| Turns your phone into this and you can even keep your handle, Toadshark |
It builds a sense of community like CB radios did, too. You can remain anonymous (like a wuss), pick a username (go with Toadshark), or go whole hog with the social thing and link your Facebook app to it (because everyone totally cares what you're doing 24 hours a day). You can friend your friends and keep tabs on each other like in Foursquare, or use it to keep everyone together while traveling in a convoy. You can thank people for alerts that they've left on the map (like when you avoid that speeding ticket because they alerted you to a speed trap), and you can clear alerts from the map (like if you find the cop is no longer in the speed trap). As you drive around you'll see all the other fellow Wazers who are currently on the road. When you get to your destination you can log in to Foursquare if you've linked your accounts. All good stuff.
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| It's just a question of which way you want to get distracted. |
John C. Dvorak believes you will need to pull over to the side of the road to use the social aspect (like flagging and confirming other users flags are still valid). With the pop-up ads that flash themselves annoyingly while you're trying to figure out if this coming intersection is your intersection to turn, he's not wrong. When trying to input a destination Waze does ask you if you are the passenger when it senses that the car is in motion because the driver shouldn't be doing that while driving. It also has a hands free mode so that it will read out alerts audibly before you come to them. You can also call out alerts to it with speech recognition, but I always have a hard time with these features because theirs usually too much interference for my phone to hear me correctly, which ends up being more of a distraction than just using the phone traditionally. Even with all thise features, it's still hard to resist reaching for the phone to confirm whether the hazard warning is still applicable or not, or to thank someone for the alert. We are social creatures and we like our opinions to matter. This has spilled over to driving. As I see it, on the one hand this app makes you safer because it alerts you to dangers before you have to respond to them, on the other hand it takes some of your attention away from what is right in front of you to accomplish this. So if you're going to use this app, use caution as with anything else. Yet and still, people will do as people do.
I've read that car manufacturers are working on similar software to be hardwired into cars themselves, so that maybe one day in the future all of our dars will be
talking to one another and sharing information, but without necessarily distracting us while doing so.
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| A choice between 316.9 miles and 2.2 comes down to how hungry you are. |
Now for the ugly, ugly problem. I was so enthused when I first started using this app because it was like Google Maps, but BETTER. Then I started playing around with the actual navigation. First problem was looking up local stores. A search for Walmart turned up Rite Aid, but no Walmart. A search for Wal Mart did get me the results I was looking for, but is the search algorythm really that sensative? Maybe not, because the Wal Mart search string produced results with the store spelled Walmart, no space. Why couldn't it find Walmart when I typed it in spelled perfectly to match the search result but then could find it when I spelled it different? And why did it find the local Rite Aid when searching for Walmart, but when I did a direct search for Rite Aid the closest one it could find was in Colorado? No idea. Even directly typing in the address you're going to (if you happen to know it) puts you at the mercy of it's fickle search string gods. It does have multiple services to search through at the bottom of the list, like Foursquare and Yellow Pages, and eventually I was always able to find what I was looking for, but ain't nobody got time for that.
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| Waze gets it's navigation algorythm from Billy of Family Circus |
Secondly, navigation itself. I haven't been on any long trips of late to test it, but with the results I got from local driving I may never try. For example, when I leave my house I am 90% of the time driving up the street, because up my street is the city I live in and down the street is a river. Yes, there's a road there, but that's all there is. But whenever I ask Waze for directions it always, always, always wants me to go down the street, towards the river. Once, instead of having me go up the road and hang a left, into downtown, it had me go down the street and take the next three lefts, meaning I had to drive 7/8ths of my block in a big circle instead of just driving the 1/8th that would have brought me to the main road I eventually ended up on anyway. This does not inspire confidence.
I was all ready to give Google Maps the heave ho and embrace the future of social navigation with Waze, but now I'm not so sure. I've even avoided recommending it to friends because to me these are not minor problems. It's so much better, feature wise, than Google Maps, but the one thing it needs to do right (get you where you're going), it doesn't. At least not reliably, not yet. Maybe Google's acquisition of Waze will lead to an awesome hybrid of the two apps, let's hope. I'll keep using it because I'm a geek and I love to tinker, and I want this to work. If you're like me, check it out, it has promise. But if you're an average user and you just want your phone to work, pass. For now Waze is a Swiss Army knife that's missing the knife.
Or the whole hottie with a third arm metaphor.
