Some years ago, when I started to receive Google Maps notifications asking me to add photos, rating places or writing an opinion about places I visited I felt some disagreement because the first thing that I thought is that Google is tracking all my data to sell it to restaurants, stores, or some business, or worse, that I was going to see advertising from many places everywhere.
I must confess that I was looking to disable the tracking of my information, but first I needed to see what was behind all this. I started to navigate on all the options that I never see before on Google Maps, I saw that some people include some friends who were writing about places they visited, giving some starts and in some cases adding photos. I asked about the reason they do that, and what are the advantages to do that. Some friends said to me that they do it to share information, others not have a real reason, but I continued with my “research”.
In addition, I discovered that more than only to evaluating places we can be an active member of Google Maps by adding places, editing places, renaming places, among many other options available. It is like you are in a video game but in the real world. I compare it with a video game because you can modify the map “building” places that are not in, editing streets, putting a correct name of a place, fixing the web page of a restaurant, all those things you will be reflected in the Google Maps and people around the world can see those changes.
To see it more like a video game, we receive points for each contribution we make, that’s very similar to what happened in a video game, also we will be increasing our level and getting more benefits when we accumulate points. The purpose of this game is to have a map that is closest to reality and each of us “competes” to be the ones that contribute the most to this cause. The enemies are basically disinformation and outdated data. And our best weapon is our cell phone and information.
Let’s play Local Guides on Google Maps!
