Google Map Maker

» see mapmaker.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

google map maker ran in more than sixty countries. when google published that list in march 2016, turkey was not on it. so the whole of my relationship with this product is that i used the maps that came out of it and never had a way to touch the thing producing them.

it opened on 23 june 2008 and it was, in plain terms, an edit button on the world. you drew the road the basemap was missing, dropped a marker on a shop, traced the outline of a building off the satellite tile. if a reviewer approved what you had done, it went live in google maps for everyone.

the reason it existed was money. in the united states or western europe google could buy commercial map data from companies that had been driving roads with survey gear for decades. across most of the rest of the world that data either did not exist or was not for sale at a price worth paying. map maker's answer was to ask the people who lived there. bangladesh and india came early, and in places like that the result was not a marginal improvement on an existing map. it was the map.

why turkey stayed off the list is something google never explained and i am not going to invent a reason for it. what i can say is that the google maps i grew up with here arrived finished. somebody else's country got the edit button.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

the drawing side was small. you had a placemark for a single point and a polygon for anything with an area, and lines covered the rest. most of the work was tracing features off satellite imagery, which worked well where the imagery was sharp and badly where it was not, so the coverage was uneven in exactly the way you would expect.

edits went into a review queue and other contributors voted on them. that is where the trouble eventually came from. experienced mappers earned auto-approval, so a trusted account could push a change straight into the live map with nobody in between.

~ the prank that broke it ~

in april 2015 somebody used that trust to draw an android robot urinating on the apple logo into a patch of green in pakistan. a second edit nearby said google's review policy was crap. both sat on the live map long enough to be screenshotted everywhere before google pulled them down.

the response was not proportionate to a cartoon. google killed auto-approval and ended user moderation, then suspended editing worldwide in may 2015 while it worked out what to do next. the tool came back for six countries on 10 august and for another forty-five on the twenty-sixth. it never recovered the momentum, and the community that had been doing the reviewing had been told in the clearest available way that it was not trusted.

~ where the edits went ~

google announced the closure in november 2016 and shut the editor on 31 march 2017. nothing was deleted. every road and every building drawn in map maker stayed in google maps, because that is where all of it had always been going. what closed was the door the contributors walked through.

the work moved inside google maps under the local guides program, which hands out points and badges for adding a place or writing a review. it is a lighter thing than map maker was. the criticism map maker attracted for its whole life was about the license: contributors granted google a perpetual worldwide right to what they had drawn and got no way to take the map back out again. openstreetmap asked for the same unpaid labor and gave the database away afterward. it is still running.

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