The days of relying on Facebook for advertising your events may soon be over, as Google has starting rolling out a new feature that lets users add their own public events to Google Maps.
You’ll be able to broadcast big neighborhood events, restaurant openings, art gallery debuts, or other important gatherings without having to spam invites or social media posts.
Public events have been in Google Maps for a while, letting you browse nearby happenings from a long list of categories like concerts, nightlife, classes, outdoors, and more. Like these, user-created public events will be view able on the map and searchable to all Maps users through the “Events” tab.
The new ‘Events’ feature was spotted by Android Police first. Google has also updated its support page to reflect details about the new feature. The support page says that the feature may not be available in all regions. To add an event, head to Google Maps on Android, tap on Contribute >Events > Add a public event. You can add an event name, tag the location, and add the time and date of the event as well. There’s an option to add an image, write more event details, and add description as well. Android Police reports that it had issues while adding an image to the event.
Once the event is saved, the creator can later edit it as well, by heading to Contribute >Events >Select your event >Edit this event.Furthermore, you can also delete the event by clicking Contribute >Events >Edit this event >Delete this event. There’s no word on when this feature will be available in all regions globally, or when Google plans to roll it out for iPhone users. At the time of writing, we weren’t able to spot the feature in the Android app.
Separately, Google has also reintroduced the city, state, and country borders on Maps for Android. The feature was removed without any warning a few months ago, but it seems to have made a comeback, with Android Police spotting it first. The borders show up when a user types broad searches like a city, or a state, or a country.
Earlier, the borders were highlighted with grey, but now, the area that you search is highlighted with red. The report says that this feature is showing up in version 10.12.1, but it’s not consistent. In some searches, the feature showed a pin, while in some the new outline features showed up. We aren’t able to see the new outline feature yet in our updated app.
