Somebody has stuck a pair of googly eyes on a postbox near you. This is the map of where they all are.
What this is
People stick googly eyes on things. A parking meter, a fire hydrant, a bin, a statue, the family dog. Then they walk off and somebody else finds it and laughs. googlymaps is the map of every one of those, and you are invited to add the next pin.
You photograph a pair you have found or stuck yourself, the app reads exactly where you are standing, and once the photo has been checked, a pin appears for everyone. That is the whole app. A photo and a place.
How it works
You take the photo in the app. You cannot upload one from your camera roll, and that is deliberate rather than awkward: the location comes from your phone at the moment you post, not from the picture, so an old photo would drop a pin on wherever you happen to be sitting instead of where the eyes actually are. A pin in the wrong place is worse than no pin, because the point is that somebody else can go and look.
Every photo is checked before it goes up. Most clear in seconds. Anything ambiguous waits for a person rather than being turned down by a machine, which matters more often than you would think: googly eyes end up on classical statues quite a lot, and a statue is exactly the sort of thing an automatic checker gets wrong.
Pins are anonymous. Not pseudonymous, not "anonymous unless you look": there is no name on a pin, no profile to click through to, and nothing that lets anyone work out that two pins came from the same person. We do not even keep the real name your Google or Apple account offers us. We generate one instead, because an app built on anonymous pins should not collect a name as a side effect of which button you tapped.
Guides
A very silly subject with a surprising amount of real craft in it. These are the practical pages: what actually sticks to what, how to photograph something small and shiny outdoors, what you should and should not decorate, and where the things came from in the first place.
- Sticking googly eyes on things, and getting them off again
- Photographing googly eyes
- What you can and cannot decorate
- A short history of googly eyes
What it costs
Nothing. Browsing needs no account at all. Posting needs one, so that somebody who abuses it can be kept out, and you need to be 16 or older to post. The app is paid for by unobtrusive advertising, never over the map, and by an optional one-off payment that removes the advertising permanently for anyone who would rather not see it.
If you want the long version, the manual is the full reference and the short introduction takes about three minutes.
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