And even if people don't just put in "home" and actually put it in the name of the city, then the link to google maps will still suck. Let's say you'd just put "CAmbridge" as your location. Wikipedia lists 24 different places called Cambridge. Or for me, there are at least 17 different Lancasters (and one person on my friends page who lives in one of the other ones (Lancaster, PA).
This problem is made even worse because I believe that Google Maps displays search results dependant on what country the search is being made from. If I search for Lancaster or Cambridge, it takes me straight to the English versions (and that's Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, mind, not the little village of Cambridge, Gloucestershire). I rather suspect that this won't be the case if you search within the USA. What this means is that even if the link shows up accurately and as a useful link for you, you've still no way of knowing that it's going to work for everyone else.
And it gets worse. If I search Google Maps for "Boston", it quite reasonably assumes I want the major city in Massachusetts rather than the small town in Lincolnshire. What's bad though, is that "Boston, Lincolnshire" gives me a list of places called "Lincolnshire" with Boston, MA. Instead, I have to search for "Boston, England". And if I'm looking for a specific Washington, nothing less than "Washington, Tyne and Wear, England" will get me where I want to go.
This is all sensible behaviour on the part of Google Maps who obviously have to disambiguate somehow, but it makes the link from the "current location" field useless at best and misleading at worst. Very, very few people are going to want to type out three tiers of address in trying to specify their location, or to test how their search performs in different countries.
The other problem I have is that most people are only going to have at most two to three locations (at most) which they regularly update from. Either many people aren't going to use this, or there's going to be a whole lot of repetitive crap being added to entries.
The feature would be most useful for posts from mobile devices, except that these generally don't support currents well. Phone posts can't do currents at all. Posting by email you probably can do this, but it doesn't seem to be documented (yet?) and is something of a faff anyway.
(And the other other problem I have is that the web update page is now formatted so that the "options" section has one column of 6 lines and one column of 4 lines, rather than two of 5 lines as would be sensible.)
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Date: 2006-03-30 12:27 pm (UTC)This problem is made even worse because I believe that Google Maps displays search results dependant on what country the search is being made from. If I search for Lancaster or Cambridge, it takes me straight to the English versions (and that's Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, mind, not the little village of Cambridge, Gloucestershire). I rather suspect that this won't be the case if you search within the USA. What this means is that even if the link shows up accurately and as a useful link for you, you've still no way of knowing that it's going to work for everyone else.
And it gets worse. If I search Google Maps for "Boston", it quite reasonably assumes I want the major city in Massachusetts rather than the small town in Lincolnshire. What's bad though, is that "Boston, Lincolnshire" gives me a list of places called "Lincolnshire" with Boston, MA. Instead, I have to search for "Boston, England". And if I'm looking for a specific Washington, nothing less than "Washington, Tyne and Wear, England" will get me where I want to go.
This is all sensible behaviour on the part of Google Maps who obviously have to disambiguate somehow, but it makes the link from the "current location" field useless at best and misleading at worst. Very, very few people are going to want to type out three tiers of address in trying to specify their location, or to test how their search performs in different countries.
The other problem I have is that most people are only going to have at most two to three locations (at most) which they regularly update from. Either many people aren't going to use this, or there's going to be a whole lot of repetitive crap being added to entries.
The feature would be most useful for posts from mobile devices, except that these generally don't support currents well. Phone posts can't do currents at all. Posting by email you probably can do this, but it doesn't seem to be documented (yet?) and is something of a faff anyway.
(And the other other problem I have is that the web update page is now formatted so that the "options" section has one column of 6 lines and one column of 4 lines, rather than two of 5 lines as would be sensible.)