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Google Street ViewGSVGSV18Platforms

BREAKING: Introducing Google Maps Platform6915

Frisco, Texas
Metroplex360 private msg quote post Address this user
Wednesday, May 2, 2018

It’s been thirteen years since we opened up Google Maps to your creativity and passion. Since then, it's been exciting to see how you've transformed your industries and improved people's lives. You’ve changed the way we ride to work, discover the best schools for our children, and search for a new place to live. We can’t wait to see what you do next. That’s why today we’re introducing a series of updates designed to make it easier for you to start taking advantage of new location-based features and products.

We’re excited to announce Google Maps Platform—the next generation of our Google Maps business—encompassing streamlined API products and new industry solutions to help drive innovation.

In March, we announced our first industry solution for game studios to create real-world games using Google Maps data. Today, we also offer solutions tailored for ridesharing and asset tracking companies.

Ridesharing companies can embed the Google Maps navigation experience directly into their apps to optimize the driver and customer experience. Our asset tracking offering helps businesses improve efficiencies by locating vehicles and assets in real-time, visualizing where assets have traveled, and routing vehicles with complex trips. We expect to bring new solutions to market in the future, in areas where we’re positioned to offer insights and expertise.

Our core APIs work together to provide the building blocks you need to create location-based apps and experiences. One of our goals is to evolve our core APIs to make them simpler, easier to use and scalable as you grow. That’s why we’ve introduced a number of updates to help you do so.

Streamlined products to create new location-based experiences

We’re simplifying our 18 individual APIs into three core products—Maps, Routes and Places, to make it easier for you to find, explore and add new features to your apps and sites. And, these new updates will work with your existing code—no changes required.

One pricing plan, free support, and a single console

We’ve heard that you want simple, easy to understand pricing that gives you access to all our core APIs. That’s one of the reasons we merged our Standard and Premium plans to form one pay-as-you go pricing plan for our core products. With this new plan, developers will receive the first $200 of monthly usage for free.

We estimate that most of you will have monthly usage that will keep you within this free tier. With this new pricing plan you’ll pay only for the services you use each month with no annual, up-front commitments, termination fees or usage limits. And we’re rolling out free customer support for all. In addition, our products are now integrated with Google Cloud Platform Console to make it easier for you to track your usage, manage your projects, and discover new innovative Cloud products.

Scale easily as you grow

Beginning June 11, you’ll need a valid API key and a Google Cloud Platform billing account to access our core products. Once you enable billing, you will gain access to your $200 of free monthly usage to use for our Maps, Routes, and Places products. As your business grows or usage spikes, our plan will scale with you. And, with Google Maps’ global infrastructure, you can scale without thinking about capacity, reliability, or performance. We’ll continue to partner with Google programs that bring our products to nonprofits, startups, crisis response, and news media organizations. We’ve put new processes in place to help us scale these programs to hundreds of thousands of organizations and more countries around the world.

We’re excited about all the new location-based experiences you’ll build, and we want to be there to support you along the way. If you're currently using our core APIs, please take a look at our Guide for Existing Users to further understand these changes and help you easily transition to the new plan. And if you’re just getting started, you can start your first project here. We're here to help.

https://mapsplatform.googleblog.com/
Post 1 IP   flag post
Frisco, Texas
Metroplex360 private msg quote post Address this user
What does this mean?

1. I imagine this impacting the overhead to service providers such as GoThru.co
2. The simplification of 18 APIs into 3 may affect the GSV Publish API. If it is being absorbed into Places API, this would mean that it would have access to other aspects of the Places API and this might lend itself to us seeing GSV contributions once again interacting with the Infograph (i.e. -- See Inside returns).

What do you think?
Post 2 IP   flag post
WGAN Forum
Founder &
WGAN-TV Podcast
Host
Atlanta, Georgia
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user
@Metroplex360

Makes my head spin. And, I have a night shoot tonight, so look forward to seeing more of your commentary here.

Best,

Dan

P.S. Running out the door ...
Post 3 IP   flag post
Frisco, Texas
Metroplex360 private msg quote post Address this user
@DanSmigrod When the GTP program was sunset and all submission activity was moved to the new 'Publish API', all of the professional Google Street View Inside tours became a subset of the Local Guides program.

This meant that essentially, Google Street View Inside Tours / Business Tours were killed off and all content was basically sent over to the same department that handles reviews, photo submissions and now video submissions.

That department is sort of like the Yelp! of Google -- which reminds me of how G+ took on Facebook and was somewhat of a nebulous mess that did not manage to do anything better than how Facebook did.

Now that there's a consolidation of the APIs into a new streamlined platform, it would appear that the GSV Publish API is to be absorbed into a larger subset of Google Maps and I would imagine that this would IMPROVE integration.

--

The GSV API will become a subset of the Maps API, not the Places API as I had suspected:
https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/maps/

But no mention is made of the Publish API ... I'm digging a bit deeper right now.

Information about the new unified platform is on all other pages, but the Publish API page is unchanged.

https://developers.google.com/streetview/publish/

And the Publish API's change log gets my official frowny face award for being outdated:

https://developers.google.com/streetview/publish/release-notes
Post 4 IP   flag post
DouglasMeyers private msg quote post Address this user
Chris ,,, just doing one of your cool videos and tell us what is means in layman terms...Please
Post 5 IP   flag post
Frisco, Texas
Metroplex360 private msg quote post Address this user
I just spoke with Chris Petracco about this and to sum it up, I think he rolled his eyes.

These structural changes may have absolutely no impact to us or to the GSV Platform.

However, I would like to believe that they will open up doors for more interaction between Google's different services. The unified platform provides clear revenue streams for Google Maps products.

Ads / $ drive things at Google -- so I believe that there's still a chance that Google will figure out how to better monetize GSV in such a manner that it may be re-prioritized and receive the features that we want!
Post 6 IP   flag post
Cincinnati, OH
leonherbert private msg quote post Address this user
@Metroplex360 My question, is this going to help my clients?
Post 7 IP   flag post
WGAN Forum
Founder &
WGAN-TV Podcast
Host
Atlanta, Georgia
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user
@Metroplex360

Thank you for posting. Yes. Would be most helpful to understand how this affects us all - and our Clients.

Best,

Dan
Post 8 IP   flag post
jfantin private msg quote post Address this user
Thanks God Chris undestand this thing.

When I received the email from Google I didn´t know what to do or what did it mean for me, as a GSV Trusted Photographer.

I still have a lot of doubts and the summary of those is @leonherbert question: How is this going to help my clients? and I will add: Is this going to help my business?
Post 9 IP   flag post
Frisco, Texas
Metroplex360 private msg quote post Address this user
I was alerted to this a few minutes before I got the email myself by several clients who were in a panic.

I believe that there may be some issues if you have a Wordpress website that uses a plugin that displays things from Google Maps that required an API Key to access.

It is possible that the restructure will force developers to change a few things in their code during a generous grace period, in order to keep things moving forward.

Beyond this, Google seems to simply be cleaning up some terminology, pricing structures, and merging some of their codebases to where one would use -1- API to accomplish what it took 5 to do previously.

--

It doesn't mean much to GSV Trusted Photographers -- Google just got excited about sending out developer level newsletters to everyone.
Post 10 IP   flag post
jfantin private msg quote post Address this user
Quote:
Originally Posted by Metroplex360
It doesn't mean much to GSV Trusted Photographers -- Google just got excited about sending out developer level newsletters to everyone.


I almost got a stroke when I read the email!
Post 11 IP   flag post
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