MeetInBetweenUs - better but still not good…
A few weeks ago I blogged about a website called Meetways that attempted to find a location half way between two addresses to meet for coffee or something similar. Well today I tried out another similar product MeetInBetween.us.
The bottom line is that it suffers from the same problems as the previous website. It seems that these kind of websites just draw a straight line between two addresses and then work out the halfway point. Then they look around for convenient coffee shops or whatever. People - this is not the way to do this! Anyone in their right mind knows that you have to first calculate the route between two places and then work out the halfway point. This is just common sense. As can be seen from my example below, the halfway point between us is not the middle of Lake Washington. That is just ridiculous! The halfway point is somewhere along the route we both must drive. Imagine the same problem with a mountain range in between, or a river, or a beach. I can’t believe that in today’s clever world companies like these can’t apply a little piece of common sense as well as ‘clever programming’.
Anyway, enough rant. This is something else that’s a good idea but needs ‘a lot more work’ to be fully cooked. On today’s election day I’d have hated to have to rely on this to find me a polling station!
November 4th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Thanks for the review and completely agree with your take on the current state of the application. We developed this application for RailsRumble 2008, which we won, unfortunately that only left us with 48 hours to do the work. We are now working on the next set of releases and one of our top priorities is to figure out a way to use driving duration and driving route between unlimited points to calculate the midpoint.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Thanks for the comments. I look forward to an update of the website application…
May 1st, 2009 at 10:07 am
[...] in late October of last year I wrote about two websites (A & B) that tried to help you out when you were looking for a place to meet halfway between your address [...]