InvisiBill |
02-03-2015 04:45 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by andyrobo
(Post 181558)
WE use Google Maps API to power the Gas Station location list. We plan to develop a tool for users to add, edit & verify data about Gas Stations in the future. We want to switch to our own Gas Station database (vs using Google) ASAP.
For now, if you want to track a fuel-up and the location it came from you can use the tag system.
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I was confused because the missing gas station was in Google Maps already. However, it was categorized only as a convenience store, which is why it didn't show up in Fuelly. I've corrected that and the station is now an available choice. I had been tracking the station in the notes/tags of my fillups, so it's easy to update them with the correct location now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by andyrobo
(Post 181558)
In an upcoming release we will be adding brand (Shell, Exxon, Esso, etc) so that might help as well. We are also going to be adding Octane, and a couple other fields related to vehicles.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by andyrobo
(Post 181586)
GasBuddy data is unavailable. I tried to get access to that via OPIS but when they bought GasBuddy their prices went sky high and we cannot afford them. Waze data is not publically available either and will be incorporated into Google at some point (since they bought them).
We'd like to find a way to crowdsource the work. We could add a button like not listed and then ask "Are you currently at the station" and take a precise GPS reading so we can have a confirmation of a station. We can then ask for users to submit info of that station (brand, etc) and we'll build our database with time. Waze and GasBuddy already went through this.
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I appreciate you wanting to build your own database of gas stations. However:
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png
I already find it annoying that Waze is separate from GasBuddy and Google Maps, as it means double or triple the work to update a station or report a price. There is room for improvement with GasBuddy, but they've got a pretty good system set up already. If GasBuddy doesn't make an API readily available, then I guess there's not much that can be done though (I wonder if you could do something with https://m.gasbuddy.com/ if the user was already logged in). But it doesn't help the community as a whole for everyone to make their own database and fragment all the users.
https://www.mygasfeed.com/ looks to be an attempt to start a fairly open database like this. However, it's somewhat new and doesn't seem to have many users. Chicken & egg...
I'm tempted to vote for using Google's database (which users can edit) for station locations tied to your own database of station details. That would make for one central repository of stations that anyone (from a much larger user base than just Fuelly users) can edit, while still allowing you to maintain your own set of details about the station. I have only a tiny bit of programming experience, so I'm not sure how difficult it would be to maintain a linked database like that compared to the benefits of having a single source.
GasBuddy seems to be the standard for gas station info and prices, but maybe it's worth the work of creating a new one if you could give it a good API and actually make it accessible to people. Google generally seems pretty open about these sorts of things, so maybe the effort would be better spent adding gas prices and more detail (I'm sure the Waze data helps) to their existing Maps data. The problem is that you basically have to be totally open about it for it to really be successful, but being open makes it harder to exclusively benefit from it also, so companies are less likely to want to do that.
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