Home > News

New Google Maps Feature for Planning Events Not New Idea

By Laura Tucker
New Google Maps Feature for Planning Events Not New Idea Featured Image

Google seems to be making many changes lately to their various features. Google Maps is one of the services getting improvements. This new feature will help you plan events with your friends and family by allowing everyone to vote on a location of where to meet. It sounds really great except for one thing – it’s not really new.

Google’s New Feature

This feature will be available on both Android and iPhone. It will help you when planning where to meet up. You can choose a few different restaurants, bars, or other establishments as possible meeting places. You can share these possibilities within the Google Maps app, and that will allow everyone to vote on their choice.

Instead of using various other chat apps, such as text messages, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp, you can do this all right through Google Maps. Others can add or delete places from the list. It’s true collaboration.

And of course, since it’s through Google Maps, the choices are all shown on a map so that everyone will know how to get there and can ask for directions if needed. It makes the process sound much easier and of course is all very democratic.

news-google-maps-south-elgin

You’ll need to have Google Maps installed on your device, of course, and will need to be signed in to your Google account, as will everyone else.

This all sounds exciting and new, except it’s not something revolutionary. It’s already in play in at least one other app.

Calio

Earlier this year I did a review on Calio and really liked it. It’s not a maps app but a calendar and reminder app. It has a ton of great features, but the one thing I really liked the most was the ability to plan events with your friends and family.

When you are setting up a calendar appointment, you can invite your friends/family to your appointment. Along with allowing everyone to place a vote on their preference for where to meet up, a meeting date and time can be voted on as well.

news-google-maps-calio

It was my favorite feature of the app. Unlike Google Maps, all users don’t need to have the app installed. They could see the choices and vote on them through a web link. But what I had a problem with was getting people to use this feature. They still preferred to use a messaging app making it not a timesaver for me.

That’s what will be interesting about this Google Maps feature. Will people use it? Or will they still prefer just to plan events the old-fashioned way through a chat app?

Conclusion

This new Google Maps feature sounds like it could be revolutionary, at least to Google if not the mobile world as a whole. But it’s unknown if people will actually use it.

What do you think about this new feature for Google Maps? Do you think it’s something you will use? Do you think it won’t make a big splash since it’s already available on other apps? Let us know what you think about this feature in the comments section.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.