Hi everyone,
it’s been a while since I commented here about our geosearch (location autosuggest) service that we launched last year.
I am happy to report that behind the scenes we continue to improve the service. Many thanks to all the customers and potential customers who have provided suggestions for improving the service.
As one example of many, yesterday we rolled out a tweak to our Leaflet map search integration. You can now easily customize the pin placed on the map after a search to be whatever image you like.
Not the world’s most groundbreaking feature, but it was one requested by a customer.
Which leads to my closing thought: this sort of slow and steady improvements are the nature of our services. There is seldom a “big bang” new feature, instead it’s about consistently tweaking to make things better, faster, easier. It’s exactly this sort of work that many companies find challenging - it’s easy to get the team excited about big new launches. It’s much more challenging to keep the motivation for month after month of incremental improvements that consistently add up. This is one of the key points I make to potential customers when I’m asked why they shouldn’t just run their own service on publicly available open-source technologies. Setting up such a service is a manageable task, but will you and your team maintain and improve it?
This dilemma - the challenge of endurance and maintenance - is what we discussed in the recent Episode 200 of the Geomob podcast which I wrote about yesterday.
Happy geosearching,