How it works

A map of the places your friends would take you to themselves, described in their own words. Every spot starts private, and the person who saved it decides who ever sees it.

What a pin is

A pin is a place plus a sentence. The place comes from Google, so the address and the map position are the ones your phone already agrees with. The sentence is yours, and it is the part that matters.

That is the whole unit. Not a score out of five, not an average of four hundred strangers who wanted somewhere to sit — one person you know, saying the thing they would have texted you anyway.

Why not just use ratings

A rating compresses a place into a number, and a number cannot tell you the portions are enormous, that you will not get a table without booking, or that the good one is the branch on the other side of the road. Those are the things you actually want to know before you go.

So instead of stars, a pin carries up to five short tags out of a fixed vocabulary — hidden gem, cash only, worth the queue, quiet enough to talk, and the rest. They are deliberately the sort of thing a rating cannot say. The full list is on the front page.

The loop

1. Sign in with Google. That is the only account there is. Adding a spot, having friends and joining a group all need one.
2. Find the place. Search for it and pick it from the suggestions. A pin drops with what Google knows about it — check it is the right branch before you save, because the location is the one thing you cannot change afterwards.
3. Say what it is for. A line in your own words, and the tags that actually apply. This is the bit somebody else will read.
4. Choose who sees it. New pins are Just you until you say otherwise. You can change your mind as often as you like.
5. It appears on their map. Anyone you shared it with sees the pin, your line and your name, next to their own.

Who can see it

You pick the audience when you drop a pin, and you can move it between these three whenever you want. There is no fourth option.

Nothing new can be public. Not as a setting you might leave switched on by accident — the server rewrites any attempt to post a public pin back to private. A stranger who opens the map sees an empty one.

Friends

You add somebody by email, and it only becomes a friendship when they agree, so nobody appears on your map without having chosen to. If they have not signed up yet the request simply waits, and turns into a friendship the first time they sign in.

Groups

A group is for a set of people who are not all friends with each other — housemates, the people you have lunch with, a family thread. Whoever starts it picks a password and gets an invite link, and joining needs both.

Send them separately. That is the point of there being two: a link that gets forwarded to somebody it was not meant for gives away nothing on its own. Whoever created the group can replace the link at any time, which stops the old one working without removing anybody already in.

Upvoting

Pressing the arrow on somebody's note tells your friends that you recommend the place. They see that you recommend it — not the note you upvoted, and nothing about whoever wrote it. It is a way to pass a recommendation along without repeating somebody else's words to an audience they did not choose.

Whose map it is

Your map is assembled out of your own pins and the ones people chose to show you, and that is the whole of it. There is nothing to browse, no strangers in a feed, and no star ratings — a place is here because someone you know put it here.

Already using it?

Help covers the buttons: where the audience label lives, how to start a group, what to do when something will not save.