Shout out to @NarenChandra who wrote his experience and also made sure he shared all the pictures from the Connect Live 2019 - Hyderabad event! You can head to that post to check out all the amazing food each of us got to eat and a really crisp and concise event that Google prepped for us.
While most of us (sorry for including you as well into this), started our journey of adding stuff on to Google Maps just for the gamification aspect of it that got us hooked into this for real and now we are unable to let this go, I realized there is more to this. This is much much bigger than what I thought it was.
Adding or editing stuff on Google Maps is fun. Can’t ignore those cute animations that popup counting the number of points you earned for posting all those pictures of the recent place you visited or the food that you ate, can you? Also, Google makes sure you keep adding more by showing those amazing analytics of the number of views, likes that you get on what you’ve posted. What other reason do you need to keep doing this? Isn’t it going to be weird to see about 100 people (approx. number) who do the same thing for various other reasons unlike you? That’s exactly how I felt at the Connect Live 2019 - Hyderabad edition. I am not new to meetups or events but this one was way too different. I felt out of place quite a few times looking at the passionate people around me doing this with so much dedication and with the great motivation to help their communities and others who use Google Maps.
My biggest takeaway was to realize that something I’ve been doing for fun is actually helping people for real. How cool is that? And also when you realize that the people working on these products are actually sitting with you and taking feedback from you? It did get real for me! Guys, you need to do this more often!
For the first post, this one’s not a weird one, is it? But that’s exactly how I felt at this really-cool-amazing-food-too-many-goodies-filled-meetup-with-a-bang-after-party!
P.S: Not to forget some of these really cool people I met here. Made new friends for sure.
