I have recently been introduced to the Sat Nav app Waze with its social capabilities that users to update the maps with events such as traffic jams, accidents speed cameras and so on.

This weekend, we went away and as my wife has the family car, she tends to do the driving – great I can have a beer. But on the long motorway runs I get bored and nod off, much to my wife’s disatisfaction. So this time I elected to keep from nodding off by comparing my wife’s car built in Sat Nav (which has data feeds on accidents etc) and Waze with its social feed information and its routing algorithms.

In terms of routing – the car and Waze are as good as each other, Waze might even have a slight edge as when we had to divert to avoid an accident it took us around a town’s high street where as the car took straight through the middle of a town with its particularly slow traffic.

The car did at least give us earlier warning of events ahead on the route we where following, although Waze allowed us to get a better sense of the severity of the issue based on the number of traffic jam reports, how old they where and so on.

What really was amusing was as a passenger I could sit looking for problems and broken down vehicles etc etc to report and pickup points (given I told friends given I travel a lot more I’d have to outstrip them on the social scoring soon).

This got me to thinking, what stops something like Waze from being extended to keeping the children entertained with a ‘car bingo’ or ‘eye spy’ given that children could add information to Waze to allow additional information and it be shared in the same manner as the serious stuff.