At Google I/O earlier this year, Google announced a raft of new features coming to Maps to help with among other things discovery of new places, and a new way to decide with your friends where you’d like to go. That feature has started rolling out to at least one user in Maps, and it looks great.
The ‘Decide with Friends’ feature has appeared for a user who shared the details with Rita over on Android Police who was able to play around with at least some of the features.
When the feature goes live for you, you’ll know it with a floating bubble type notification showing up in your search results when you search in Maps. Once it’s live you can share places to a short list which can be viewed by yourself and who ever views the list as either a list, or as a map view to see where the places are located in reference to each other – and the potential attendees.
Once you’ve created your list you can either drag the list to the bottom of the screen like closing a Facebook Messenger chat head window, or share it with potential attendees using the sharing intents menu. Once people you’ve shared the list with are in, they can view the places or add more (at least they will once it’s live), upvote or downvote selections before a decision is made.
The owner of the list will receive notifications of what you’re doing in the list, and any shared lists now show up in a ‘shared’ tab in Google Maps.
There’s no telling when the feature will roll out more broadly, but it looks quite useful if you’re the social type who likes to organise outings with groups of people.
