Trials and Tribulations With Fusion Tables

Recently I’ve had a chance (should I say “a need”?) to play with Google Fusion Tables. This is a beta service that seeks to make it easier to mashup piles of data onto maps or do other interesting things with it. I happen to want to put the data on a map. I have about 55,000+ geographic data points that I want to be able to visualize. Google Fusion Tables appears to be exactly the right application to do it. But so far it hasn’t been all wine and roses. Perhaps more like guns and roses? Sorry, I just had to go there.

But I digress. So picture this: I load up all this data in Google Fusion Tables, “geocode” it (which fetches latitude and longitude coordinates based on a street address) and voila! I have my map. But wait a minute, this is clearly missing data that I know should be there. OK, let’s look at it in table form. Hmm…some addresses are highlighted in yellow while others are not. Long story short, it turns out that the addresses depicted in yellow have not been geocoded and therefore cannot be depicted on the map. It also bizarrely puts one of my data points – complete with the State designation and correct California Zip code — somewhere outside of Detroit.

OK, sez me, I’ll geocode it again, which I dutifully do. Still no love — or I should say, some love, but not enough. Eventually I learn, from this page, that “There is a limited number of geocodes offered for free per user per day, so very large data sets may require repeating this step until the file is entirely geocoded”. Oh, nice. Was there ever any indication of this? No. In fact, there was a counter-indication of this. That is, when you go to geocode your address data, so you can mark it on a map, the process begins and eventually “completes” at “100%’. Well, I don’t know what “100%” means because it is not 100% of anything I can figure out.

The point is this: I get it if you need to throttle a free service – fine, I’m down with that, and will comply with your terms of service. BUT TELL ME WHAT THEY ARE. Don’t leave me guessing, and wondering why something that has completed at “100%” is nowhere near that.

As it turned out, I needed to go through many iterations of a “100%” process to eventually get all 55,000+ items of my database geo encoded. Did I think Google, which processes billions of items in a blink of the eye would barf on 55,000? No, of course not. Did I expect a process that said it completed “100%” to be far, far less than that? Of course not.

Bottom line: I’m fine with dealing with limitations of a free service. But don’t hide them behind smoke and mirrors.