I must admit that I love my iPhone for the most part and I do love the Google maps on my phone. It has helped me find my favorite restaurants, find my way back home after I missed my turn, and helped me out of more jams than I could ever imagine. However, I noticed the last time that I was traveling down the Tri-State trying to find the nearest Subway before class that I noticed that there was this weird pin that showed up on my map and had someone else's name on it. I didn't think much of it until I came across this article on Tech Crunch "Google Injects Ads and User-Generated Content Into iPhone Maps"
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/03/google-injects-ads-and-user-generated-content-into-iphone-maps/
As we were talking about User-generated content this week in class, after reading this article I had to think "What was Google Thinking?", why would this be of any value to your users? If anything, this just reinforces in my mind how big companies start to make stupid mistakes and ultimately lead to their demise when they don't have their customer's best intentions front of mind.
I hope Google is reading your post. Perhaps, like Facebook, they will listen and react.
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