Memories as a Map
Google Photos can now remind us what it was like to travel
Years and years ago, I recall being on a plane, staring out the window,¹ and dreaming up a service that would allow me to quickly record anywhere I’ve been in the world to look back upon later. A sort of automated travel diary or DVR that would offer up nostalgia as a service. This sounds quaint now. Little did I realize that smartphone location tracking would make such data commonplace, but in some ways dystopian.
Still, I never quite found the perfect service for what I wanted. Foursquare was undoubtedly the closest — and it’s why to this day I still check-in on its consumer successor, Swarm. People ask why: I have a decade of travel memories in there! Other services have popped in and out of existence with elements of this as well: Fog of the World, Timehop, Gowalla.
Then Google Maps started doing this, which makes sense. And it works quite well. But again, to some this is creepy as it’s not what the product was built for or the main reason people use it. Most people use Maps to figure out where to go, not to remember where they’ve been. And so the front-end isn’t ideal.
I think Google Photos may have just made such an ideal product.²
With their latest update today, the product rolled out a map view which looks like almost exactly what I’ve been looking for. Visually, it offers up a cool heatmap of where you’ve been — but unlike Maps, the data isn’t populated by your precise movements, it’s from the photos you’ve taken. I like this as a sort of opt-in layer — and, of course, this is also not meant to be a social networking feature, this data is meant for me. For memories.
Instagram long ago had a similar map element which I loved. I used to use it to zoom in and out of the world, reminiscing about travel. In fact, one of the original things I loved about Instagram was how it let you geotag photos (using Foursquare data, before they ruined it for a bit with the move to Facebook). It was sort of a Panoramio done at scale. Then they killed that feature off (you can still geotag, but there’s no real map view). And again, I’m not sure it was exactly right for a social network anyway — or at least not one with the graph of Instagram.
Snap is a more interesting case study on how to do these social maps right. Because the network is more tightly correlated to your close (or at least actual) friends, people seem to be more comfortable sharing their whereabouts. Of course, that service, built on top of Zenly, is more predicated around real time. What I want is nostalgia.
In that regard, Apple’s Photos app perhaps has come the closest. But it’s buried in Albums -> People & Places -> Places. And it’s a bit literal. I believe Google Photos just leaped it by making it a first-class feature.³
We increasingly use our cameras for everything. Family. Receipts. Remembering where we parked. Connecting the location dots to further solidify these memories makes all the sense in the world. And productizing that in map form is brilliant. Just what I’ve been looking for. Especially in an age where travel is a distant memory.
¹ This was so long ago that planes didn’t yet have WiFi, so I had to, you know, sit quietly and think.
² And here’s where I’ll note that Google is a sister company to the fund where I’m a partner, GV, under the Alphabet umbrella. That said, I like to critique as much as praise :)
³ And yes, I have my photos backed up on both iCloud and Google Photos, because these are my most important memories!
