I'm sort of at a loss why this is being upvoted-- am I missing something? I feel like other people are excited about this but I can't for the life of me see why...<p>This is something that every mapping product should have, no? Really not trying to troll just trying to figure out what I missed...
Basically, it is intended for business to add themselves on Apple Maps aka crowd sourcing. There is also an indoor positioning for businesses that qualify certain criteria. SearchEngineLand has some screenshots of the process to add your business on Apple Maps.<p><a href="http://searchengineland.com/apple-launches-maps-connect-self-service-local-listings-portal-206349" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/apple-launches-maps-connect-self...</a>
I would bet that this is directly related to Apple's 2013 acquisition Locationary -<a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130719/apple-acquires-local-data-outfit-locationary" rel="nofollow">http://allthingsd.com/20130719/apple-acquires-local-data-out...</a><p>This is exactly what Dan and Grant built Locationary for, to crowdsource and manage (validation, collisions, conflicts) massive location based datasets.<p>Locationary's Saturn platform was worldwide, with hundreds of thousands of locations outside the US, so I'm guessing its only a matter of time before Apple opens it up.
This is half-baked. I started the process to add a business, and halfway through I accidentally clicked off of the 'Add Business' popup. It lost all of my info (I thought), so I started over with the 'Add Business' wizard. Once I submitted for approval, I could then see the old entry that I started. But, you can't even delete businesses yet - so now there is a half-filled-out business just sitting there.
Still not going to be interested in Apple Maps until they start to update their data. Mercer St in Seattle is one of the main east-west routes between the highway and surface streets, and they still haven't figured out that it is a two-way street (which happened close to a year ago), and that most of Broad St no longer exists. This makes it useless for quite a lot of people here: basically anyone in the Belltown, Queen Anne, and Magnolia neighborhoods.
Bizarre design. Pretty tourist pics and an Apple sign-in. Which Lastpass fills in anyway, so heck, I sign in. And then I am looking at "frosted glass" rectangle (Yosemite desktop effect I assume) that covers the pretty pics and asks if I have a small business.<p>No, I do not. But there is no way to say that. Nothing to explain what this page would do for me if I did, and nothing to tell me what use it is (or isn't) since I don't. No back-story at all. Why did I sign in?
BEWARE. When I try log in it says my apple account has been locked out for security reasons. I went and reset the password and successfully logged into a bunch of other apple stuff, but when I tried to log into maps connect it said I was locked out again.
1.<p><pre><code> Request limit exceeded.
You have exceeded your page request limit. Please try again later.
</code></pre>
2.<p><pre><code> What is your business address?
United States (with no input option, static text)</code></pre>