blog of kaiyen

A few days ago, I wrote about my thoughts on how Google is going nowhere in particular, and everywhere in general.  I was being generally being pretty fair about it, but the fact is that with all the power and personnel that Google has, why are there still so many items disconnected?  No integration, having to invite the same 5 people to each of 4 different Google Apps that are supposedly all part of the same “suite” of tools.

And, again, google seems to be missing the boat on a few things.  For instance, if I were looking at Google’s market opportunities, I would not only revisit the integration with TripAdvisor’s wealth of information, but let’s look at how TomTom has added Google features to their latest GPS units. If you get a TomTom unit, then you aren’t getting a whole lot.

Now, to their credit, you can go to Google Maps and then send the address to your TomTom Live unit.  That’s pretty cool, and it is something Google did.  So kudos for them.  But for the most part, it’s about pulling traffic data.  And…that’s far from disruptive.  It’s far from anything special.

But…why can’t I search google from my TomTom?  Get Google reviews from it, in exactly the way I suggest they do with TripAdvisor?  Why…is Google just presuming that everyone will come to them, rather than the other way?

sigh.

I’m heading out on a trip along the Oregon coast very soon and have been trying to make sure my GPS can find all of the hotels we’ve booked.  The problem is that many of them are just addresses along the highway.  That’s probably fine, but I know that, for instance, in Big Sur, there are addresses like “100 Highway 1″ that won’t work at all.

Coordinates, however, are supported by my GPS.  But google maps does not convert the indicated address location into coordinates.  Or at least it doesn’t do so in an obvious way.

It turns out that if you select the link option after mapping a place, embedded in that link are the coordinates, though they aren’t formatted correctly and will likely need a bit of testing to make sure they’re right.  Rather frustrating and I think a bad feature to omit, but I guess I should be happy there is a workaround at all.

More google thoughts later…