Seven years ago today, and only two months after Google Maps was released, VirtualGlobetrotting (then Google Globetrotting) started accepting submissions of cool locations from around the world.
Archive.org doesn’t go back to the first month of VGT’s existence, but there is a snapshot of the site after a month and 2,045 maps.
Milestone Posts
Here’s the first map (I) ever posted:
The 10,000th submitted map:
The 100,000th submitted map:
The 100,000th approved map:
Stats
At the time of this post, 133,638 maps have been submitted, or over 52 a day! At this rate, we’ll hit 150,000 by February 18, 2013 and 200,000 by October 8, 2015. And #1,000,000 will be on November 20, 2057!
VGT started out only accepting imagery from Google Maps (46,396 maps), but once MSN Virtual Earth/Windows Live Local/Windows Live Maps/Live Search Maps/Bing Maps came onto the scene, we’ve seen nearly as much satellite/aerial imagery from them (44,084 maps). Google still holds the crown of most submissions due to the very popular Street View (an additional 42,576 maps), adding to their total of 88,972 Google maps. Poor Yahoo, at 173 maps…
The most popular posts, and categories, are obviously celebrity homes. We’ve all seen Will Smith’s house a ton of times on the front page as the day’s most popular map, but here it is again in case you missed it:
The most popular non-celebrity home is #36 overall:
Did you know the most popular non-celebrity category is Buildings – Scientific – Astronomy?
Special Thanks
I wanted to thank all of the amazing contributors to this site. Year after year, you still find amazing new places to explore. I also want to thank the moderators whose dedication has made VGT an amazingly clean, fun place to visit.
What’s Next?
I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and suggestions for how we can improve the site. Do you have ideas for a new feature? A different way of organizing submissions? Something that would make submitting maps quicker?
If you do, please let us know: http://virtualglobetrotting.uservoice.com/