2022
Why I love about Google Maps:
I love being able to make a difference. I remember being in Glenns Ferry, Idaho about 5 years ago, and a small business owner was on the phone, telling someone how to get to his business. He said, “Oh, you’re all the way over there? You’re way off. Yeah, Google Maps isn’t any good in Glenns Ferry. You have to…” And then he gave directions on how to get to his business.
That stuck in my head, and then when I realized that I could quickly fix things with Google Local Guides, Glenns Ferry was one of the first cities that I helped to clean up. Glenns Ferry really was a mess, because the satellite images had all of the East-West streets about 15 meters off. And, I think that I’ve helped to clean up most of that really cool town. Now, I picture that business owner saying, “Oh, how do you get here? Do you have Google Maps?” I’m sure that’s not realistic, since it’s a farming town with a lot of old people, but I still have that picture in my head that I’m helping people.
I don’t do Google Maps for the “benefits”:
Okay, I was really motivated to get that free terabyte of storage, but now I rack up about 200 points (which is what used to be required for the free storage) about every two weeks, without any direct benefit to me. For me, it’s about prestige, cleaning things up, and personal challenges. I have 8679 points right now, and for me it’s really cool to have more points that anyone else that I know in person. I guess that’s not much prestige, because I don’t have anyone except this board to tell about it, but it works for me. I love cleaning things up. There was a 7-Eleven by my house in Utah that I had noticed years ago was wrong. And, one of the first things I did when I realized that Local Guides let you make map edits was to fix it. It was off by about a kilometer, but my edit went through within a few hours. I felt so empowered in being able to make Google Maps better that I then spent all of my free time editing the rest of the places in the world that I knew really well. Google Local guides is great for personal challenges. There are many different ways to contribute, and so I love the variety of different ways that I can contribute. One thing that. Google Local Guides was so engaging that I only ended up playing Pokemon Go for about 30 minutes, before I went back to contributing to Local Guides.
My favorite thing to do on Google Maps:
I love when I find a business listing without a photo, or with only low-quality photos. Then I upload my photo, and then I go back to the business listing, and then my photo is the main photo on Google Maps. I think that is so cool, and it makes me super excited every time it happens. It never gets old to have my photo be the main representation of a business.
The most 7-Eleven pictures that anyone has contributed to Google Maps
I love 7-Elevens, and I live in Bangkok, which has the most 7-Elevens of any city in the world. Japan actually has more 7-Elevens than Thailand, but Bangkok has many more 7-Elevens than Tokyo. I believe that I’ve contributed more pictures of 7-Elevens than anyone else in the world. I think I’ve taken pictures of over 400 different 7-Elevens so far. There’s a good practical reason for this, besides it just being cool. The first time I’m walking down a new street, I always take pictures of the 7-Elevens, and I fix the business listing if it’s wrong. Then, the second time I walk down the same street, I have kind of “grounded” myself with the 7-Eleven business listing, and so it makes it much easier to contribute to the other business listings. I recommend this to other people as a technique, and you can pick anything that you want to pick, like gas stations, parks, burger shops, etc.
Switching over from Amazon:
I’m a former top Amazon reviewer. At my height, I was reviewer #187 out of about 30 million people/accounts that have written at least one Amazon review.
I moved to Bangkok about a year and a half ago, and my Amazon review-writing ground to a screeching halt. You can ship stuff from Amazon to Thailand, but there is about 100% shipping and import taxes on everything. So, I decided to buy locally, and now I don’t get anything from Amazon to review.
But I love reviewing things, and telling people about cool things, so I needed a replacement. So, I replaced my Amazon efforts with Google Maps. It’s a lot different, since I was doing mostly video reviews on Amazon, and there’s nowhere to upload videos to Google Maps. I took a lot of my reviewing styles for businesses reviews. Except now I’m trying to make “sound bites” out of my reviews, so that Google’s AI can most often quote me on things that I say.
My history + Google+
I started contributing to Google Maps about eight years ago when I wrote about fifty reviews, mostly of local restaurants. Then Google released Google Plus, and I quickly signed up for Google+. I quickly unregistered when I realized that it de-anonymized my Blogspot blog. Then Google restricted any additions to Maps to only Google Plus users, and I was so sad. I stopped contributing to Google maps. And I tried again about every six months to see if they lifted the Google+ restriction. Then, when I moved to Thailand and I couldn’t do Amazon reviews, I tried again, and I was so happy that I could finally contribute to Google Maps again. Oh, and as a side note, after I became a Local Guide, I de-anonymized my blog, and became a Google+ user.
Google Maps still doesn’t know how to deal with duplicate listings
I really hope that my input can help out with this. How Google Maps deals with duplicate listings is really bad. I’ll make a separate post about my suggestions and ideas with this.
Doing everything for Google’s AI:
When I was an Amazon reviewer, I would always make video reviews that I thought that the public would like. Amazon’s AI isn’t great, and they really only use it to screen out offensive words with their reviews. Google’s AI is so awesome that there’s nothing that can compare to it. Now I find that I’m trying to please Google’s AI. So, when I take a picture for Google Maps, I think, “What will the AI think about this picture?” When I write a review, I think, “Which sentences will the AI like the best?” For me, it’s a fun challenge, and I find Google’s AI generally smarter than the masses of Amazon shoppers.
My tips for 360 pictures:
Here’s a brief summary. I have a full list in another post.
- Pick a point, and put a coin on the ground
- Then pick a point above the coin, around eye level (I usually do mine at shoulder level)
- Find where your camera lens is
- Make sure that the camera lens is always as stationary as possible, at that point that you picked. Meaning, that you should be stepping around that point
My tips for taking great photos (that Google’s AI will love):
- Google slices and dices your photos in a whole bunch of different ways. So, the best photos still look great when they’re cropped in many different ways.
- So, mainly, I make sure that if the photo is cropped into a square, then it still looks good.
- Google does a ton of AI on each picture, so I try to do things like:
- Take pictures of pizza at a pizza shop
- Include pictures of airplanes at the airport
- Include the business name, in a way that’s big enough for the AI to notice it, but not so big that it fills the whole image
My goal is to improve a business listing:
I always want a business listing to be better after I’ve contributed to it. So, I find that I take more time, the better that a business listing already is. If a business already has 200+ pictures, then I always take a 360 picture. If a business doesn’t have the hours, I contribute the hours. I like feeling that the business listing is better after I’ve been in contact with it.
I have to make my own goals:
I achieved Level 5 pretty quickly. Then, I noticed that the picture would change every hundred new points that I got. Then, I maxed out the new picture icons. Now I don’t get any new gamified motivation for contributing, so I have to make up my own goals. Here are some of my goals:
- Level 5 (achieved)
- 1000 points (achieved)
- 2000 points (achieved)
- 4000 points (achieved) I picked 4000 points as a goal, because I read somewhere on a message board last year that someone else had 4000 points. Now I’ve met a lot of people with a lot more than 4000 points, but that was my goal for a long time, and it kept me contributing.
- 1000 edits of different business listings (achieved)
- 1 million new picture views every week (achieved)
- 10,000 pictures uploaded (almost there)
- 10,000 points (will achieve in about a month)
- 1000 reviews (will achieve in about two months)
- 1000 new businesses added (will achieve later this year)
- More picture views than residents of the country I live in (will achieve later this year)
- More points than that guy who made 15,000 edits (may be impossible, since he keeps making more edits)
- Then, I need some better goals
