tell a friendX
Google finally caught up with Woophy
Posted by joris on June 6th, 2008 | 3 comments | 604 views
Of course we at Woophy don’t have the illusion that we can compete with Google. There are probably more than 100,000 websites on earth which are bigger and more significant than Woophy, and Google is definitely one of them. But in the past three or four years we had the illusion that we were much better in showing a large number of pictures/information on the map than Google. We could show more than 2,000 dots on our map while Google maps (not Earth) only showed a limited amount of information (dots) on their map. In fact Google did not even show photos on the map.
The good news for Google is that they finally caught up with us. The new Google maps is now able to show really huge amounts of pictures, take a look here. We have to admit that it works really smooth and very precise.
Does this mean that Woophy lost its reason of existence? Well we don’t think so, we think that the meaning of Woophy is our community of dedicated and talented photographers (you!) and the high quality and significance of the pictures on the site.
If you like to discuss about the significance of Woophy in comparison with Google and Panoramio just go to this forum topic.
Comments
# posted by Tigreramon on June 11th, 2008 3:06 pm
I find the google map a bit crammed with all these photos. I like woophy's dots-on-map more.
But the biggest advantage of the woophy system is that the map is searchable and the dots vary their colour with the
quantity of found items. E.g. you want to find all white beaches on earth? Simply type in "white beach" in the search tab and there you are. And it would be even better if you could do an AND search to make searches even more exact. (Wishlist!)
The interface design of both, panoramio and flickr is rather crap. It's more fun to move around woophy. Very stylish. However additional map layers would be nice. At least something like that what google calls terrain view.
What flickr and Panoramio do very much better is sorting images by interestingness and they do so mainly because being active in the community i.e. on-line-buddies-regularly-viewing,-commenting-and- favouriting is only a tiny part in determining whether an image is good. Roughly speaking, flickr does it around the idea of who is looking at your pictures from where, how and when and what he's doing with the image (commenting, putting-on-a-note, favouriting, downloading, blogging, continuing with your photostream, contacting you). Your buddies count lower than some anonymous guy doing a search for something specific and then finding your image. Obviously it was interesting to him/her and that without even knowing you. Oh, and tags/keywords are VERY important. 95% of all views come through keyword searches!
So generally, i use
- woophy for the pure pleasure of browsing the world map and viewing photos and to have an on-line representation of my pics from some 20 years of travel so that everybody who went along has access to the photos neatly spread out on the map.
- google maps errain
because that's the best map (google's satellite imagery is an unspeakable sludge of spinach acre)
- yahoo mapssatellite
because yahoo has done a much better job in finishing it's satellite imagery. A beautiful representation of our earth's surface, especially in the colourful desert regions.
- flickr
for specific image searches. Forget search engines, flickr has everything you might looking for whatever remote. Their image upload count varies between 1500 and 3000 images uploaded per minute. So their images sorting-by-interestingness-thingy must be DAMN good since my flickr searches aren't flooded at all by cats, flowers, sunsets, boobs, bums, and friends-and-family pics.
But the biggest advantage of the woophy system is that the map is searchable and the dots vary their colour with the
quantity of found items. E.g. you want to find all white beaches on earth? Simply type in "white beach" in the search tab and there you are. And it would be even better if you could do an AND search to make searches even more exact. (Wishlist!)
The interface design of both, panoramio and flickr is rather crap. It's more fun to move around woophy. Very stylish. However additional map layers would be nice. At least something like that what google calls terrain view.
What flickr and Panoramio do very much better is sorting images by interestingness and they do so mainly because being active in the community i.e. on-line-buddies-regularly-viewing,-commenting-and- favouriting is only a tiny part in determining whether an image is good. Roughly speaking, flickr does it around the idea of who is looking at your pictures from where, how and when and what he's doing with the image (commenting, putting-on-a-note, favouriting, downloading, blogging, continuing with your photostream, contacting you). Your buddies count lower than some anonymous guy doing a search for something specific and then finding your image. Obviously it was interesting to him/her and that without even knowing you. Oh, and tags/keywords are VERY important. 95% of all views come through keyword searches!
So generally, i use
- woophy for the pure pleasure of browsing the world map and viewing photos and to have an on-line representation of my pics from some 20 years of travel so that everybody who went along has access to the photos neatly spread out on the map.
- google maps errain
because that's the best map (google's satellite imagery is an unspeakable sludge of spinach acre)
- yahoo mapssatellite
because yahoo has done a much better job in finishing it's satellite imagery. A beautiful representation of our earth's surface, especially in the colourful desert regions.
- flickr
for specific image searches. Forget search engines, flickr has everything you might looking for whatever remote. Their image upload count varies between 1500 and 3000 images uploaded per minute. So their images sorting-by-interestingness-thingy must be DAMN good since my flickr searches aren't flooded at all by cats, flowers, sunsets, boobs, bums, and friends-and-family pics.
Maybe you can make an arrangement with Google to provide a link to further pictures at any location by clicking a Woophy link on the Google map this would bring more people and members to the site: is it possible to do this I wonder?
So what makes whoophy a great page "for me"? The people on it.
Thanks to the page coordinators for keeping such a good atmosphere and fellowship in here...
My apretiation and respect to all woophy members