Google Tour Builder

» see tourbuilder.withgoogle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Tour Builder was made for two groups of Americans and I was in neither of them. The first was veterans, which is where the launch came from. Google put it out around Veterans Day in November 2013 with the pitch that someone who had served could lay their deployments onto the globe and walk their family through where they had been. The second group was American schoolteachers, who took the thing over almost immediately and kept it alive for the rest of its life.

The mechanic fits in a sentence. You searched for a place, dropped it into an ordered list, attached photos and a paragraph to it, and Google Earth flew between the stops in sequence when somebody pressed play. It came out of Google Creative Lab working with Google Earth Outreach, the part of the Earth team whose job was handing the globe to people who were not mapping professionals.

What made it work was the ceiling it refused to have. Nothing in it was configurable the way a real GIS tool is configurable, and that was the whole proposition. A history assignment about a migration route needs a map with five points on it and a picture at each one. Tour Builder did that in a browser and gave you a link you could hand to somebody, and it never once asked what projection you wanted.

~ the record ~

~ the classroom years ~

Earth Outreach was never a consumer program. Its work was putting the globe in front of nonprofits and teachers, and Tour Builder ended up the most used thing it ever shipped, mostly because a school librarian could teach the whole tool inside one period. The tours that got made were not the ones in the launch film. They were state history projects and book reports mapped onto the geography the book actually happens in.

The ground underneath it kept moving, though. The 2013 version leaned on the Google Earth browser plugin, and browsers spent the next few years tearing out the plugin architecture that depended on. Google rebuilt Earth for the web in 2017 with none of that in it, which fixed the platform problem and in the same move created the successor that would eventually make Tour Builder unnecessary.

~ the postmortem ~

The notice went out on 26 August 2020 through the Earth Outreach mailing list, and by Google standards the runway was generous. Almost eleven months, with two ways out: push a tour straight across into Google Earth for Web, or download it as KML or CSV and hold onto the file. The stated reasoning was that Projects in Earth for Web did the same job with 3D views and Drive collaboration on top of it.

On 15 July 2021 the tool went off, every link to a tour stopped resolving, and the user data was deleted. That last clause is worth reading twice. Not archived, just deleted. Nearly eight years of tours, built mostly by teachers and mostly by people who had never heard of a KML file, gone unless somebody in that building had read a mailing list post from the previous August. The replacement really is better. It just did not arrive with a truck to move anyone's things into it.

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