[OSM-talk] Nice problem to have
Richard Fairhurst
"Massive jump in #OpenStreetMap traffic due 2 Apple news: t.co/nB4ffgYy
Fighting fires 2 keep systems up"
* switch2osm.org fell over. Yep, so many people wanting to find out
about switching to OpenStreetMap that WordPress crapped itself (ok, not
the hardest target but hey ;) ).
* More contributors. We've had people come into IRC saying "I want to
fix this park name, how do I do it?". Regular IRCers have been reporting
a noticeably greater number of new editors in their areas. Or as someone
just asked on IRC: "hmm did the apple fanbois drink the OSM koolaid and
crash our servers with zealous mapping?"
* I think we've had a higher peak of publicity today than we've ever had
- higher than the Foursquare switch even, or the Google vandalism
incident. We've been Slashdotted; we're #6 on Hacker News. We've been on
The Verge, Forbes, Wired, Ars, Gizmodo, and all the Mac sites - that's
taking OSM to people who've not heard of us before. We might not be the
front page of the New York Times yet, but we're getting there!
* And one of the best things has been that people like how we've handled
it. From Forbes: "OpenStreetMap itself has been much more polite about
the whole thing. 'It’s really positive for us,' OSM founder Steve Coast
told Talking Points Memo, 'It’s great to see more people in the industry
using OSM. We do have concerns that there wasn’t attribution.'."
From a comment at Hacker News: "While I think it's quite messed up
that a company as rich as Apple can't abide putting credits for people
who have put some really good work in (I've even made small updates to
OSM in my time) I do think that this is a very classy move by the OSM
people, no ranting blog post or 'Apple stole our stuff', welcoming
people presents a much better image of the project."
Or The Verge: "Granted, OSM took this as an opportunity to get in
the public eye by piggybacking on the iPad’s media fanfare; I applaud
them for their maturity in their statement though. Many companies
would’ve latched onto this and unleashed the lawyers threatening this
and that, but they chose to be civil, point out the missing
attributions, and say they are ‘we look forward to working with Apple to
get that on there.’ A little civility goes a long way (in my book). I’m
quite sick of the mudslinging in this space."
Thanks to everyone who's put the hours in today, to all the coders and
sysadmins who sweat blood to not only keep OSM running but make it
easier and faster... and to every single mapper making a map so amazing
that everyone _wants_ to use it.
cheers
Richard
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Martijn van Exel
* 3500 tiles per second. Seriously. In Grant's words on Twitter: "Massive jump in #OpenStreetMap traffic due 2 Apple news: t.co/nB4ffgYy Fighting fires 2 keep systems up"
[...]
Thanks to everyone who's put the hours in today, to all the coders and sysadmins who sweat blood to not only keep OSM running but make it easier and faster... and to every single mapper making a map so amazing that everyone _wants_ to use it.
--
martijn van exel
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1109 1st ave #2
salt lake city, ut 84103
801-550-5815
http://oegeo.wordpress.com
Kai Krueger
Richard Fairhurst wrote
>
> * More contributors. We've had people come into IRC saying "I want to
> fix this park name, how do I do it?". Regular IRCers have been reporting
> a noticeably greater number of new editors in their areas. Or as someone
> just asked on IRC: "hmm did the apple fanbois drink the OSM koolaid and
> crash our servers with zealous mapping?"
>
March) there were a little more than 2300 mappers who have contributed the
first time to OSM[*]. This is considerable more than the average of 1300 -
1400 new mappers per week in the recent past. This imho shows that the
publicity of Apple and Foursquare using OSM directly resulted in new mappers
for OSM. Although it isn't the complete record, that was around the 13th of
September 2009 (anyone know if there was a special occasion arount that
time?), it is the second highest number yet. Furthermore, with the news so
fresh, perhaps we will still beat the record.
The complete graph can be found at
http://apmon.dev.openstreetmap.org/new_mappers_per_week.eps and I'll
hopefully soon update the graph on the wiki stats page (
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats )
Kai
[*] The statistic is calculated from the weekly changeset dump. I.e. the
week in which an account first shows up in the changeset files, i.e. their
first edit. There are currently 233002 out of 554709 accounts who show up in
the changeset file or 42%.
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Paul Johnson
On Mar 8, 2012 3:37 PM, "Richard Fairhurst" <ric...@systemed.net> wrote:
>
> * 3500 tiles per second. Seriously. In Grant's words on Twitter: "Massive jump in #OpenStreetMap traffic due 2 Apple news: t.co/nB4ffgYy Fighting fires 2 keep systems up"
That's incredible! Explains some of the slowness lately.
> * switch2osm.org fell over. Yep, so many people wanting to find out about switching to OpenStreetMap that WordPress crapped itself (ok, not the hardest target but hey ;) ).
That certainly is a nice problem to have!
> * More contributors. We've had people come into IRC saying "I want to fix this park name, how do I do it?". Regular IRCers have been reporting a noticeably greater number of new editors in their areas. Or as someone just asked on IRC: "hmm did the apple fanbois drink the OSM koolaid and crash our servers with zealous mapping?"
Heh, must have missed that moment. Or it happened on that other network and not Freenode.
> * I think we've had a higher peak of publicity today than we've ever had - higher than the Foursquare switch even, or the Google vandalism incident. We've been Slashdotted; we're #6 on Hacker News. We've been on The Verge, Forbes, Wired, Ars, Gizmodo, and all the Mac sites - that's taking OSM to people who've not heard of us before. We might not be the front page of the New York Times yet, but we're getting there!
I'd give it a couple days. It'll happen.
> * And one of the best things has been that people like how we've handled it. From Forbes: "OpenStreetMap itself has been much more polite about the whole thing. 'It’s really positive for us,' OSM founder Steve Coast told Talking Points Memo, 'It’s great to see more people in the industry using OSM. We do have concerns that there wasn’t attribution.'."
Wow, TPM and Forbes...somehow missed catching that on Google News, links? I've been Mr. Popular at work because of the publicity today. I'm often mapping during downtimes at the office, so quite a few coworkers stopped by to ask me about that. Folks asking about OSM completely overshadowed the fact it's my 30th birthday at work today.
> From a comment at Hacker News: "While I think it's quite messed up that a company as rich as Apple can't abide putting credits for people who have put some really good work in (I've even made small updates to OSM in my time) I do think that this is a very classy move by the OSM people, no ranting blog post or 'Apple stole our stuff', welcoming people presents a much better image of the project."
Well, I think a big help on that is that Apple does distribute other FOSS stuff, including the GNU Manifesto (irony!) and EMACS in with MacOS.
Frederik Ramm
On 03/09/12 01:10, Martijn van Exel wrote:
> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/08/apple-using-openstreetmap-data-in-iphoto-for-ios/
> - interesting to see the irrational Apple fanboy commentary..
It's a recurring motive. Company switches to OSM - users complain.
Almost identical statements can be found in the discussion threads from
Skobbler's switch to OSM in the beginning of 2010 (two years ago - they
should get a honourable mention on switch2osm.org!), or when
geocaching.com started using OSM, or Foursquare, or now, Apple.
In most of these cases, the company making the switch took great care to
explain to their users/customers why they were doing it, and what
advantages they saw (even those for whom it was a pure, un-emotional
business decision). This often helped take the edge out of the switch.
Over and above what was required by the license, many of these companies
also supported OSM with funds, data, or application development (or at
least promised to do so).
I shall be interested to see what Apple's communications strategy is
towards OSM.
I'm a stranger to the Apple world but if they are subject to the same
kinds of cock-ups as ordinary companies then I'd guess that this might
well be a temporary thing, where their homemade solution wasn't ready by
the deadline and so they quickly needed something else to fill in.
Nobody who seriously considers working with OSM would use data that is
almost two years old?
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail fred...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
Maarten Deen
> On 03/09/12 01:10, Martijn van Exel wrote:
>>
>> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/08/apple-using-openstreetmap-data-in-iphoto-for-ios/
>> - interesting to see the irrational Apple fanboy commentary..
>
> It's a recurring motive. Company switches to OSM - users complain.
> Almost identical statements can be found in the discussion threads
> from Skobbler's switch to OSM in the beginning of 2010 (two years ago
> - they should get a honourable mention on switch2osm.org!), or when
> geocaching.com started using OSM, or Foursquare, or now, Apple.
Comment #53 on [1] is a very nice example of fanboyism.
[1] <http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1336277&page=3>
Regards,
Maarten
Paul Johnson
> Thanks for summarizing Richard. Really amazing to see the amount of response
> this is generating. Only some of the Apple-specific blogs are catching on to
> this, MacRumors among them:
> http://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/08/apple-using-openstreetmap-data-in-iphoto-for-ios/
> - interesting to see the irrational Apple fanboy commentary..
Jebus, some of the comments that made it into the "top rated" section
there are misinformed to the point of inducing braincramps.
Michal Migurski
I've reposted it here, after tracking down URLs for each of the stories and comments you mention:
http://mike.teczno.com/notes/nice-problem.html
-mike.
----------------------------------------------------------------
michal migurski- mi...@stamen.com
415.558.1610
Iván Sánchez Ortega
> * 3500 tiles per second. Seriously. In Grant's words on Twitter:
> "Massive jump in #OpenStreetMap traffic due 2 Apple news: t.co/nB4ffgYy
> Fighting fires 2 keep systems up"
I'm guessing my transparent map comparison is responsible for some of that.
Geez, now I owe the sysadmin team n+1 beers.
--
----------------------------------
Iván Sánchez Ortega <iv...@sanchezortega.es> <iv...@geonerd.org>
Kai Krueger
Kai Krueger wrote
>
> This imho shows that the publicity of Apple and Foursquare using OSM
> directly resulted in new mappers for OSM. Although it isn't the complete
> record, that was around the 13th of September 2009 (anyone know if there
> was a special occasion arount that time?), it is the second highest number
> yet. Furthermore, with the news so fresh, perhaps we will still beat the
> record.
>
mappers in a week, it is a resounding yes. This week (beginning 8th of
March) saw nearly 3300 new mappers, clearly beating the old record!
Richard Fairhurst pointed out that the old record was set in the week
Monopoly City Streets launched (a large scale internet game using
OpenStreetMap data), so again due to a popular user of OpenStreetMap.
So the more large sites use OSM, the faster the mapping community grows and
therefore it is imho import for OSM and its community to care about its data
consumers as it benefits from them even if they don't "give back".
Kai
P.S. I have posted the daily statistics since the beginning of the year at
http://pastebin.com/rHt9MT3f
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Peter Wendorff
> Kai Krueger wrote
>> This imho shows that the publicity of Apple and Foursquare using OSM
>> directly resulted in new mappers for OSM. Although it isn't the complete
>> record, that was around the 13th of September 2009 (anyone know if there
>> was a special occasion arount that time?), it is the second highest number
>> yet. Furthermore, with the news so fresh, perhaps we will still beat the
>> record.
>>
> Well, to answer my own question if we can beat the record of most new
> mappers in a week, it is a resounding yes. This week (beginning 8th of
> March) saw nearly 3300 new mappers, clearly beating the old record!
>
> Richard Fairhurst pointed out that the old record was set in the week
> Monopoly City Streets launched (a large scale internet game using
> OpenStreetMap data), so again due to a popular user of OpenStreetMap.
>
> So the more large sites use OSM, the faster the mapping community grows and
> therefore it is imho import for OSM and its community to care about its data
> consumers as it benefits from them even if they don't "give back".
>
> Kai
>
these additional users.
How much do they contribute? Do they do more than adding their home or
their own shop?
It's nothing to say against these users, even if it's not more, but I
hope to be wrong while guessing, that mappers "invited by" some of these
"user projects" aren't necessarily interested to become part of a
community of mappers and to participate in that manner.
To conclude: we probably should be careful to reduce these "records" to
the pure user count.
Peter
Lester Caine
> It's nothing to say against these users, even if it's not more, but I hope to be
> wrong while guessing, that mappers "invited by" some of these "user projects"
> aren't necessarily interested to become part of a community of mappers and to
> participate in that manner.
> To conclude: we probably should be careful to reduce these "records" to the pure
> user count.
'contributing users' who have more than say 10 commits?
--
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Tom MacWright
Toby Murray
How is this different than any other new user?
We have 120,000 accounts (52% of accounts with any edits) with nothing
but 1 or 2 changesets and 180,000 (78%) with fewer than 10 changesets.
And those numbers are from before this week. So I say new users are
new users are new users, no matter where they come from. Most will
make minimal changes. Some will do their town/neighborhood and a very
few will become ongoing active contributers.
Toby
Tom MacWright
Cartinus
> What's the point of being so dismissive of new users, and pessimistic on
> whether they'll continue contributing?
Nobody in this thread is dismissive of new users. They are dismissive of
(useless) statistics.
---
m.v.g.,
Cartinus
Toby Murray
> Making 60 changesets, spending a lot of time editing OpenStreetMap, and
> going from being a public critic of the maps (versus Google Maps, of course)
> to a public advocate is a big deal, even if it's just one person.
>
> A 52% active user percentage isn't terribly low: it's similar to services
> like twitter.
>
> What's the point of being so dismissive of new users, and pessimistic on
> whether they'll continue contributing? Why not actually try to encourage
> people to contribute and make it easier for them, rather than scoffing at
> their edits of 'just their own neighborhoods': that's where everyone starts,
> after all.
I agree and wasn't trying to be pessimistic. I was just pointing out
that being dismissive of these new users from the recent publicity
we've gotten is silly because they are just like any new OSM user.
They're all good. The more people that make their first edit, the more
will make their 60th no matter where they come from!
Toby
Jaakko Helleranta.com
We might not be the front page of the New York Times yet, but we're getting there!