Thanks for the feedback guys
Usability for the site is one thing I'm still working on, so I was interested to hear the feedback that it seemed difficult to generate a mapcode. The website needed to fulfill both a 'service' role and an 'educational awareness' role, which is why I had to create that interim landing page between a user selecting a location and actually generating their mapcode ... else people with no exposure to the system wouldn't understand what they were doing, why, or why what they were receiving is useful. I might need to tweak it more, if usability is a common consensus.
For the people who think that physical addresses are a reliable form of navigation, how many people drive to new locations armed with only the mental knowledge of a physical address and nothing more? I have a lot of personal cases where you can ask people on the side of the road where something in that area is, and they all just don't know because who memorises physical addresses around themselves? Unless you have stellar local knowledge, you're going to get seriously lost. Relying on a mapbook is just essentially an 'address translation system' anyway, albeit of the offline variety ... and mapbooks aren't great for navigating because they don't take into account road upgrades or current travel conditions, and generally can't be used while actually driving (not safely anyway). They're useless for off-road navigation when the physical addresses end (unless you're handing out grid references).
Where mapcodes come in handy is for all the other use cases: for example, 'on the ground', where street addresses are non-existent (most of our fine country actually - I live on a plot, and you don't want to know how hard it is to get delivery people to me) or just terrible (there are so many cases of streets with jumbled or incomplete numbering). Don't brush over that, genuinely think about it: how are you going to guide people to a specific bush in the middle of the veld in 7 digits or less, via a code they can write down by hand?
Or how about in the preparation phase, where you're trying to communicate a precise physical address over the phone (good luck reading out lengthy physical addresses and spelling out Alpha-Lima-Papa...), or even when you're wanting to enter something into your car GPS (it's shorter to enter RYX.2P than "30 Lynwood Road, Faerie Glen" one digit at a time. My website compounds the benefit of mapcodes by allowing you to enter two mapcodes and immediately see the directions between those two in Google Maps ... good luck getting two Google Maps pins and then getting the average consumer working out directions between them.
On the last point, I had to travel to somebody recently and they shared their address with me via a mapcode on WhatsApp, and before leaving for them I just copied and pasted it from WhatsApp and into the 'Use a mapcode' feature on
www.overhere.co.za in the Driving Directions section, and it kicked into Google Maps and took me straight there ... it was utterly painless. Yes you can also share a pin location with people, but a pin is only useful if both parties have an electronic means of transmission and receipt. You can send a mapcode by SMS and decode it later, or scribble it onto a piece of paper, and achieve the same pinpoint level of accuracy as if you'd written down GPS coordinates (which you won't do because nobody is that masochistic).
It might interest some people that TomTom satnavs already support mapcodes natively, so if you'd like you can pop one straight in. The only reason Google Maps doesn't support it natively is Google is trying to push their own Google Plus Codes system, but my website gets around that quite easily thanks to the personalised links it generates based off lat-lon conversion.
Finally, the key part of this for me is not that I have the perfect implementation of mapcodes. Rather, I've simply aimed for a workable showcase that can continue to start conversations like this. It is child's play for a developer who is working on call centre applications, for example, to integrate mapcode conversion into lat-lons via the free, public domain Mapcode libraries (the same as I did), and from then on that entire call centre just has an extra way to receive pinpoint addresses from the public. And that speaks to the last post above me: a mapcode by itself is just that, a code. That's why when my website generates mapcodes I even provide a 'Word of mouth' suggestion for how people can communicate not just their code, but the fact that it can be interpreted on my website ... it's an awareness challenge to overcome, and it starts one place at a time. This is only the start.
