No GPS/maps system seems to offer the option for FasTrak or carpool lane.

No GPS/maps system offers a way to tell a driver in a carpool lane if they have to change several lanes to the right to merge onto another freeway, or if there is a new carpool lane opening up to your left that takes you directly onto the next freeway you way to get on.

This is what happens when you have an oligopoly (Garmin, Google/Waze, Apple) and everyone's product, design and sales people are in the Valley or Tel Aviv and not more driver-centric cities with much more traffic and orders of magnitude more route options like Los Angeles.

I'd thought a FB acquisition would have been very important for FB -- it would have given them user-provided location info down to the foot for 50M people, which seems to me right up FB's alley (Where are you? Where are your friends? Where are you going? Where are they going?).

For Google, this will obviously cement their domination in the mapping space. As it is, they're so vastly far ahead than others (I think I heard from a friend who works there that they have 10,000+ people on the Maps team worldwide?)

Either way, Waze is awesome and despite the cynicism around what the big guys sometimes do, I can only imagine this making the app better and better.

This is a competitor to google's maps, the only thing they'd do is shut it down (or at least not make anymore updates, ah-la sparrow) and not integrate the ideas into Gmaps.

From the founders standpoint this makes total sense, though, it's obvious this was the end game because they had no money-making business model.

Map was never free data - I think they started with OSM, but later switched to a proprietary data source (and of course, they are crowdsourcing more data and updates from users)

I do not believe (anymore) that google could acquire Waze and leave it as a standalone product. Which would mean lots of compromises in terms of community interaction because google has different approach to this than Waze does.

Even more - waze approach to handling UGC in terms of map editing is somewhat not perfect, but with google involvement it could be discarded (not fixed), since it's not trivial to come up with better way.

Google, i believe, is more interested in traffic data than in community map editing, but latter one gives Waze lots of its appeal.

If you're a user of Waze now, if anything then the situation can improve for you. Now being a purely Israeli company Waze is surely more susceptible to Israel intelligence agencies tracking than as part of Google. Yes, it will likely become more susceptible to U.S. intelligence agencies now, but this is not what your comment was about.

However, Waze using a dynamic map is able to provide mapping for the West Bank as well. While Google opened up its navigation app a few months ago in Israel, it has not been opened for the West Bank (possibly because of map licensing restrictions that similarly prevented opening it for Israel for so long).