A year ago we wrote an artfully beautiful tribute to Waze on Valentine’s Day, entitled “How do I love thee? Let me count the Waze.” Funny thing, we thought we were being deliciously clever, but check out a google search for that title and you’ll note we’re not the only one to think of it.
However, we are in fact number 1 in the Google search results for that topic (so I’m not saying you should read that #1 post, but you should probably read that #1 post).
Ok, so a year has passed. So what’s happened to Waze? Sure – they’ve updated their interface and made it smoother better bigger bolder. I was going to do a UX breakdown of all the updates, but well candidly, that’s a little boring.
What is interesting is that Waze just released an SDK so you can integrate their real-time mapping functionality into other apps. Check this article out. The gist is that by letting companies like Lyft, Cabify, and 99Taxis integrate with Waze, more data will be gathered, providing an ever better experience to Waze users. It’ll even make driving safer by automating route updates which was previously a manual process for Lyft drivers.
What I find so fascinating is how this transforms Waze (and hence owner Google) into an ever more important service for big businesses. According to this excellent article on TechCrunch, Waze is operating on multiple fronts to increase their enterprise footprint. As part of their connected citizens program, Waze will provide data to their broadcast partners for traffic reporting. So, Waze’s footprint gets bigger, its data gets better, and Waze gets entrenched in all of our lives in more and more interesting ways.
It’s all about the data. And for the consumer, it’s hearts once again, on Valentine’s Day, for Waze.
Read our original love letter to Waze here, and let us know what you think about this navigation app in the comments below.
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