My meeting with Google Maps started in early 2008, when I was passionate by Quest games in my native city Kherson (Ukraine) and my team needed some distance coordinator, who understand how Google Earth application works:)
10 years after, when in March 2018 I bought my new Samsung S9+, I didn’t switch off my GPS location, so after every visit of unknown place, I’ve got a notification about possibility to answer some questions for that place or share my review of it.
Firstly, it was annoying - what do you want from me, Google? I thought I was too busy for this stupid things - to tape even a few words about places that I visited. Of course, there was nothing to add about possibility to download the photos of that locations. No way!
Luckily, I was really too overloaded even to switch off these notifications. And during one of my business trip to Lviv I took some pictures of my hotel room for my boyfriend. When I sent those pictures to him, I’ve got a typical question: “How was your visit to this hotel” and just a second after I asked myself - why not to share these photos with others? Finally, I have already sent it to one person, so why other people can’t look through it?
I quickly wrote a small review and downloaded some pictures of hotel room interior. And what was a surprise for me, when a month after I’ve got an e-mail that there were more than 1000 reviews of my pictures!
At that moment I understood that Google Maps is not just an application to get a way to some places - it’s also your possibility to help another people to know a little bit more about this world!
After that I started to type about almost every new visited place. I even wait for notifications with that famous question - How was it for you?
Now I’m an active Local Guide and try to find a few minutes in a day to write about every place in the world that I visit for other people!