MapQuest continues to bolster their brand with a refreshed and reinvigorated product offering. The latest update to the mobile experience is an integrated social sharing feature for places.
Similar to a pin drop on iOS, users can now share a specific place with a contact on their mobile phones, facilitating place-based sharing for friends, family, groups and social networks.
Groups trying to meet up at particular places, families heading to sports games at different fields, and friends meeting up at new restaurants will all find this new feature useful.
Another use case is for users who'd like to share a recent discovery with their friends and networks online - a secret spot or a beloved shop, for example.
MapQuest's Doug Serton spoke to Tnooz about the importance of sharing in this context:
Sharing is core to consumer behavior on mobile devices as people look to stay in touch with family and friends in real-time.The ability to easily share a location directly from MapQuest allows users to do just that – keep connected on and offline with those most important to them along travels, near and far
MapQuest has been on a tear lately, as they strive to improve the positioning and utility of what is actually one of the most popular websites on the internet.
Recently-added features also include a traffic reroute, which automatically takes mobile users around traffic pain points.
The automation of this feature is the most intelligent aspect - a "duh" moment that shows a clear understanding about mobile navigation use cases.
Our traffic-based routing is based on INRIX data. INRIX collects more real-time traffic info from more sources than anyone else in the industry, including crowd-sourced data from commercial fleet and consumer vehicles as well as GPS-enabled mobile devices. MapQuest’s real-time traffic coverage includes over 200,000 miles of roads in North America, which is essentially all major roads in medium-to-large cities. And the coverage is even better during rush hour.
The updated app is available on both iPhone and Android.