Who doesn’t love statistics? They’re an incredibly great way to see your progress, give you an intrinsic motivation and also plan your next attack. Since most of the feedback that I’ve provided hasn’t been taken on board, I decided to develop my own interim solutions that work for me. Because what you might want to suggest as a feature request, probably 99% of the general population doesn’t even want to, and aren’t fascinated by numbers (such as views, edit composition, photo location, etc.). Here are some developments that I have put together:
Map Marker Heatmap
A few months ago for the Sydney Conquest I loaded 2700+ photos unto the desktop Google Maps. All the time once I got to a massive amount of photos loaded, it often started crashing. What the script does it that it does not load any additional photos or information in the left-hand side but instead only loads the map markers on the map while permanently scrolling down unless ‘Esc’ is inputted or it has reached the bottom. With no photos needing to be uploaded, you only are given the map markers on the map, and are not interactible in any way (such as hovering for the place’s information), but you’ve gotten your whole heatmap within a matter of minutes.
Edits Aggregator
I have always been interested as to the percentage and proportion of edits that I have made since my lifetime as a Google Maps user. Especially nowadays it’s given me a numerical indicator as to how sour I should be regarding the algorithms. Once you navigate to the ‘Edits’ section of the desktop version of Google Maps, you can activate the script there. Similarly for the photos, it will stop loading both the map markers and the information on the left-hand side, and instead extract all the information and put it into a TextEdit or Notepad file.
What you need to understand regarding edits and the aggregation of such is the following:
- Every edit has a particular unique ID. This ID will help identify the edits that were suggested months ago and once they are actually reviewed (either by a human, or possibly even a machine) the same edit ID will pop up within the metadata and the aggregator will detect it, eliminating the possible scenario of any duplicates being counted.
- Each edit also has it’s timestamp. This especially works in emails where a pending edit is also reviewed, as it will show when the edit was initially made/suggested.
- The edit itself in this case for Pending edits will only count at the initial point of suggestion as noting the behaviour of the algorithms and irrespective of the final outcome.
Using such information, it helps extract data that’s privately visible to you, by loading information and then going into each of the edits through a data-interchange to read and therefore mark down the information into a writable word processor. And this is all doable without going outside an ‘inspect’ or through other vicarious means.
The new badges (that I still haven’t gotten) are a great step forward, but there is still much to do in terms of a holistic database of statistics such as a detailed overview of each of the points you’ve gotten.