Find your Waze

Wouldn’t it be great if you could harness the magical power of the internet to guide you through Richmond’s peril-filled streets? NOW YOU CAN. Well, you’ve able to do this for quite a while now via the Maps app on your iPhone or a dedicated GPS device. But neither of those solutions have harnessed the […]

May 3, 2012; 7:41 AM • by Ross Catrow

Wouldn’t it be great if you could harness the magical power of the internet to guide you through Richmond’s peril-filled streets? NOW YOU CAN. Well, you’ve able to do this for quite a while now via the Maps app on your iPhone or a dedicated GPS device. But neither of those solutions have harnessed the social, always-on aspects of today’s internet usage. Luckily there’s Waze!

Waze is a newish social-enabled turn-by-turn navigation app for your iPhone, Android, or Blackberry¹. I say newish because they have 12 million users worldwide, which is great because that means some of those users (kind of a lot actually) are right here in RVA.

Basically, Waze adds crowdsourcing to navigation. Which, I know I know, like we need another social doohickey plugged into our Facebooks cluttering up our Walls. But this actually kind of works. Think of it like Wikipedia but for getting to work as quick as possible. Users can report (with voice recognition–don’t use your phone while driving, OK?) traffic, hazards, and police cars so other users can avoid those things and be on their merry ways. Not only that, but Waze will learn your preferred routes to your favorite places and optimize its suggestions accordingly. And if you are really into it, you can actually edit the map to help make the directions more accurate. How cool!

I’ve been using it for a couple weeks, including a trip to Blacksburg, and have been impressed with just how fun the app is to use. Part of that might be some of the (now mandatory, it seems) gaming features they’ve thrown in, and part of that might be that I am a huge map dork. But part of it might be that Waze is just a super cool app.

Best part: it’s free!

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May 3, 2012 7:41 AM 6