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Google Ride Finder Announced
nthitz writes "Need a ride? Now Google has included the ability to lookup where taxis are in real time! The new service is called Google Ride Finder. Using a combination of Google Maps and Google Local you can see where certain taxis are at the moment. Currently there are only 11 major cities that are supported, and there are still only a few cab companies that are involved. The service is pretty cool, but if they don't add more cities/companies, who knows how well it will do. For more info check out Google's Blog."
Neat idea, but I'd like something that tracks public transportation vehicles. Accessible via a WAP browser, it would be a great thing to have while waiting at a bus stop at 3am wondering WHERE the frigg the bus is!
Looks like they are getting closer and closer to being able to locate my keys in my house for me. Awesome.
Sometimes I think Google is running too much and too fast.
:(
Google Maps and Google Local (thus Google Ride Finder too) are available only for US citizens.
Services are fine, are good, are nice, and I'd like to see something similar for my area too (I live in Italy).
My not-so-secret dream is that one day they'll extend all those great services to the rest of the world, maybe before launching tons of other services I would only look at saying "it would be nice to be able to use it..."
Oh, well, I feel like I live in the third world
-- Personal Blog: http://www.delymyth.net/ (italian)
Did anyone else see the GMAIL login page become this: well i'm not good enough to download the page, there's a funny handdrawn picture, but here's the text: Welcome to Gmail A Google approach to math. On the eve of Gmail's one-year birthday, our engineers were toiling away furiously. Notes scribbled all over the walls. Complex calculations on napkins and empty pizza boxes. Millions of M&Ms. The result?... starting today, we're beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan. The key features are: Write, don't worry. You want to stop caring about storage. We want to keep giving you more. Today, and beyond. The gift that keeps on giving. 1102.353769 megabytes of storage (and counting) for every user. No complicated equations. No tough algorithms. Just this one graph: Gmail turns 1 today. And we've always loved a good joke. We know we won't reach infinity, but check out what we will do ...
Gmail Sign In
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Password:
Don't ask for my password for 2 weeks.
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Check out our new features!
A few words about Gmail and privacy.
I guess this is wicked cool if you have a cool cell phone or PDA. I can definitely see the benefit in signing up for this service by a cab company.
There are three types of people in the world.
1. People who don't get April Fools jokes
2. People who get April Fools jokes, and laugh at them but don't tell.
3. People who get April Fools jokes and shout out "OMG I BET THATS AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE". They're incapable of running with a joke, they insist on pointing out the joke, and are also the same people who tell you your shoes are untied, and when you look go "HA HA GOTYA". They also get beaten a lot at school.
April 1st!!!
/.
Yeah, I hate this day on
I'm coming back tomorrow when all the bogus crap is over.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
Quick! Try and use above 1GB of storage! If you can't, we can sue them for false advertisement!!! We might have to go to France to do it, though.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
This is a taxi-finding service, not a ride-share service.
If I wanted a cab, I think I could have just called the cab company dispatcher or flagged one down. I'm not sure how booting my computer, looking up the site then requesting a cab is any faster than the current way of hailing a cab.
If it is a joke, it's a pretty good one. It knows that in Dallas, TX, Super Shuttle is a local service, and is in fact the only one it supports, right now.
Also, they've increased my mailbox size. Read this.
Actually, March 31st. Check the date on the blog. Not a gag.
April 1st!!!
Of course nothing legit *cough* GMail *cough* was ever announced on April Fools Day.
I'm coming back tomorrow when all the bogus crap is over.
:)
Ahahah, you must be new here, you'll be waiting alot longer then a day.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Yup mine's up to 1114 MB. yay for google!
Informative? Just telling people what day it is counts as informative? Seems like a pretty low standard.
Oh, wait, I see, it's informative because he's pointing out that it's an April Fools joke. But really, is saying "IT'S A JOKE!!!" really all that informative?
Particularly considering that a small amount of reflection will reveal that it is not particularly funny; and a small amount of research will reveal it is an actual functioning service. Which is to say, it is not, in actual fact, a joke.
You have to see how they're doing it. Earlier when I checked, I was up to 1100 something. I just checked again, and it's 1114. It looks like they're doing the reverse of nibbling away, by giving everyone 1 extra MB at a time, and then when they reach the end of the userlist, starting over.
I'm not making this up, if you have a gmail account, go see it. Mod me down if you look and it's a joke.
Oh, up to 1116... I'm never going to get to sleep tonight, I have to keep checking.
I've contacted Google numerous times about the problem of no distance scale on Google Maps and yet still no distance scale; I mention this here since the Taxi finder feature is using Google Maps.
... without a distance scale on the map, the user is left wondering how far two points are - distance is important in determing whether one has enough gas, money, time, etc to get to the intended destinaton.
Map makers, the ones that actually collected the data for the maps Google, etc uses, know how important scale is for both creating an accurate map *and* as well as for the user of the map
In short, Google Maps is nice, but without a distance scale, it's of limited usefulness.
If anyone from Google is reading this, please chime in regarding this matter - thanks in advance.
Ron Bennett
Screw the Taxi tracker. I'm looking forward to a Google Gulp, found here. My favorite bit:
From forest to freezer: A Google Gulp history
It is estimated that nearly half of Planet Earth's plant and animal species live in tropical rain forests, the vast majority of them undiscovered by humans and therefore not yet subjected to commercial exploitation. For Google, this cornucopia of undigitized data represented an irresistible acquisition target. So, for the past two years, as his 20% project, VP of operations Urs Hoelzle has spent one day a week collecting flora samples in several Bolivian sub-equatorial rain forests. For the most part, the compounds he returned with were nothing special - the usual grab-bag of future steroids, muscle relaxants, skin care appliqués and long-shot cancer drugs.
I bet Google Gulps are good with vodka. Shit, anything is good with vodka.
porp
Beyond that I'm not sure yet. If it gets integrated with traffic/weather reports or works on mobile devices it would be more useful. It's definitely a pretty cool hack no matter what.
Mobile service providers, r u reading this? :-)
am I the only one that thought about the freelance mode in NFS:U2 ?
In related news:
google also announced a new service, called "google date finder", to ease chances for _challenged_ people (read: geeks). In conjunction with google maps, google local, google ride finder and datefinder.com, the service is expected to be a huge breakthu success....
Powerful is he who overpowers his temptations.
I thought this was a joke (they like their jokes), but I guess not.... last year's joke was GMail. This year's is: http://www.google.com/googlegulp/
-Palal
Does NOT require ActiveX. It does require one of the following:
IE 5.5+ (Windows)
Firefox 0.8+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Netscape 7.1+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Mozilla 1.4+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Probably because the code makes extensive use of the XMLHttpRequest feature (""Ajax" to some), though that doesn't explain why it doesn't work with Safari outright. Through a quick view source, I can detect they're using XSLT, and that's probably why Safari can't. But none of this matters, as Tiger's coming out very soon and we can expect Safari 2.0 to support a lot that it couldn't before.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Differently useful (I don't want to say just as good, since they're different things) would be a way to click and drag to get a distance between two points. Or a way to click to set a point for directions (instead of typing in an address). I have a feeling they're working on these things.
My other first post is car post.
I checked it out and found it totally useless. The cab company in Milwaukee is legit. The cars hop around like gps errors, the dispatcher won't necessarily send the closest since it might be taken already. Most people I know use only 1 cab company.
Bus tracking would be a much better idea. I don't think they have tracking equipment, though I could be wrong.
GoogleChick - finds hot chicks in your local neighborhood
GooglePizza - finds hot pizza in your local neighborhood
GoogleCrack - finds hot crack in your local neighborhood
Then, the transformation from "Google, Friend of the World" to "Google, Matrix Overlord Ruler of the Human Slaves" will be complete...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'd like a search engine for car pooling. The only reason 90% of the cars on the road have no passengers is the inability to organize a more efficient scheme; this would require only centralized planning. A computer service would be ideal for the task, so long as it had sufficient start-up popularity. Google does. Get on it, Google; save us some gas money.
Here is a link to a screenshot: http://www.joefarish.co.uk/images/gmail.jpg
To me, it's completely useless. When I need a cab, I'm face down on a bar somewhere with no internet access.
From http://www.google.com/googlegulp/faq.html
11. When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?
Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We'll commit when we're ready, okay? Besides, what's so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory - and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.
Don't really need that here but bloody hell I wish someone would get off their ass and hook up London bus locations to the net. They're already fitted with some sort of tracking system so the bus stop can tell you when the next one is coming so its not like it would cost anything but people would really appreciate being able to look it up on the net or on their phone so they didn't have to leave the house before they had to.
Personally I think it would push bus usage right up which is something they mayor keeps going on about, that is in between increasing the prices to the equivalent of a gallon of US gas per fucking bus ticket! and letting the bloody privatised bus company bosses get away with making personal millions. The dick head also has some other bright ideas - invest millions in putting ticket machines on EVERY bus stop in central London because buying a ticket on the bus 'slows everyone down' - of course the roadside ticket machines break down daily and that holds the bus up longer when the driver argues with someone who can't get a ticket and then gets out and tries to fix it.
Just to think the money from those now disused ticket machines (i could have told them it wouldn't work from the start) could have been spent on this, but oooh no, what do they do? they go and by some stupid Mercedes bendy buses which promptly piss off everyone on the road and catch fire! ok that's the end of my London rant, if you ever come here its probably easier just to get a black taxi, they're everywhere, they've memorised every road, they can use the bus lanes and will get you there fast and in comfort, but they're bloody expensive.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Another story that sounds great for an instant until you relise it's US only.
The internet...aggh!
A blog I run for the wealth
Nono, April 2nd is when we get the dupes of the April 1st stories.
... ah, you're way ahead of me.
And April 3rd is when we get
Where I live, having GBS on the busses would be redundant and fairly useless.
If I'm at the bus stop, I can look at the sign and printed there it tells me that the bus will arrive at 9:53 am. I check my watch and at precisely 9:53, the bus pulls up. Every time.
When friends are at my house in the evening, they may hop onto the web to see what time the subway is leaving. Not just the last train, but any one before that.
When I lived in the states, in Washington DC, there was no attempt at keeping a schedule at all. I was on the subway one time, in the first car, when the driver stopped for a few minutes in mid tunnel, to chat with another driver who had also stopped. Since I was near the front, I could hear it and it wasn't safety-related or anything justifiable, it was all "Hey, girlfriend, how's your Momma doin'?"
Here in Tokyo, they move about twenty-seven million people around on mass transit every day. (Compare that with NYC's daily 3.1 million.)
I guess to do that you have to be pretty precise about your timetables.
Strangely though, last night there was a one hour delay on my usual train. Somebody had jumped in front of it. That's about the only reason things get slowed down.
-- My Weblog.
I seriously hope this one is an April Fools joke too: HTML formatting in gmail. I can't believe they did it. the scourge of email has made its way into the best webmail there is.
yes >
With a not so subtle dig at M$:
11. When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?
Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We'll commit when we're ready, okay? Besides, what's so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory - and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.
Sorry to correct you, but I've used both Google Maps and Google Local to find businesses in Montreal, Canada. It was a terribly useful feature and I am quite pleased with it. I don't know where you are from, but I can confirm that up here, it works just fine :)
iopha
Note: It says "taxis available". Also, that number is updated. Hence, one can draw the conclusion that the "taxis available" are taxis that are not currently occupied, meaning this is practical value.