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Your Google Maps Lists Aren't Broken, They Weren't Built for You

· Daniel Yoo

This tweet of an overcrowded Google Maps of Manhattan went viral recently on X/Twitter. They call it a “post-modern art project.” I see it as the story of their life on a map.

People replied with their own maps filled with their stories. The restaurants they loved, the shops their friends recommended, the wine bar where they went on their first date, the museum their kids loved. These places imbued with our experiences are meaningful to us beyond a “like”. We return to them and recommend them for how they made us feel as much as how good they were.

Where it breaks

So why does Google Maps make it so hard to use our lists, an “unusable mess” as this tweet says? Our map is filled with these memories from our lists, but beyond tapping them one by one, there’s no real way to use them. For example, you can’t search your Favorites list for a good bar to meet your friends in, or filter them to see which playgrounds your nephew loved. It all comes down to what the app was built for.

Google Maps is built for discovery and navigation, not the story of your life. That’s why your lists feel broken. It wants you to search across all places, so it can understand your intent and show you results (and ads). It wants you to go somewhere new, so it can learn from your reviews, ratings, and saves. It doesn’t want you to stay inside your lists, revisiting the same places, because it means fewer ads and less data to collect.

So you’re left zooming in and tapping your saves one by one.

A map that’s yours

The problem is we’re trying to use a search engine to build our personal maps. We need a new kind of app, a personal mapping app. So I built one.

Odyssey Maps is my answer to Google Maps. Save every place you’ve been to, and freely rate and add your own photos to them without any of it being public. The park where you went on your first date, the bar where you watched your college football team win it all, the museum where your nephew marveled at the big blue whale. Rediscover and revisit your places without random places you’ve never heard of popping up in the results.

Here’s my Odyssey Map of Manhattan, just from the past two years. It starts out as a wall of pins, but turns into something I can actually use. I filter down to the restaurants I liked in Manhattan, and suddenly I’m choosing between the places I know I love and can recommend.

It’s not a map of everything, it’s a map of what mattered to me.