On Dec 9, 6:42 pm, Andy Idema <[email protected]> wrote: > Apologies to those > of you who thought I violated the google tos.
For what it's worth (having just got home and back online), I reckon that while implementing a free login is within the terms, restricting people's eligibility for a free login is almost certainly outside it because it means the map is not "generally accessible". That's a specific legal construction of language and means "accessible by anyone and everyone", which isn't the case if some people cannot get logins. While you could argue that only people who are eligible for a login will be interested in the map anyway, it still means that Google's advertisers won't get the coverage they should. Ordinary map tiles are getting specific businesses as POIs on them now, so it can't be all that long before API tiles do. When that happens, or even sooner, Google may start to take an interest in sites which request the API but can't actually be crawled either because of robots.txt or a login. You then run into Gregory's second scenario and have to deal with that as well as wiping egg off face. Andrew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-api?hl=en.
