About googlymaps
googlymaps is one person's project. I'm Luca Intini, and I designed, built, and run it on my own, from Perth, Australia. There's no company behind it, no team, no office: just a sole trader with an ABN and a domain, which the Terms of Use spell out in the boring legal detail that has to exist somewhere. Day to day, it's just me reading the support inbox.
What it is
A world map of googly eyes. Somewhere near you, someone has already stuck a pair of wiggly plastic eyes on a fire hydrant, a garden gnome, or a bus stop pole, and googlymaps is where that gets recorded: a photo, a precise GPS fix, and a pin that appears for everyone once the photo's been checked. No title, no caption, no comments. Just the eyes, and where they are.
Why it works the way it does
The idea is small on purpose. A googly eye stuck to something is funny for exactly as long as it takes to notice it, and that's the whole transaction. It doesn't need a profile, a follower count, or a feed deciding what you see next. So the build decisions mostly went the other way from what an app usually does: I kept taking things out.
There's nowhere on a pin to type anything, not a caption, not a tag, not a note. That single decision removes the one thing on this map nobody has ever checked, because the automatic reviewer only ever looks at the photo. A text box is also the fastest way to turn a wholesome app into a place where someone writes something they shouldn't, and the fix for that particular problem is not to build the box at all.
Pins carry no name either. When you sign in with Google or Apple, both are
happy to hand over your real name along with the login, and I throw it away
and generate a random one instead (googly_ and a few characters). Nobody
asked for your name to make this app work, so collecting it as a side effect
of which sign-in button you happened to press felt like exactly the kind of
thing that's easy to do by accident and hard to undo once it's sitting in a
database. There's no profile page either, because a profile page is the
first brick of a social network, and a social network is not what this is.
That same instinct ruled out a few things that would have made the app more "engaging" in the way that phrase usually means: no streaks that punish you for missing a day, no notification nudging you back in, no way to buy your way up a leaderboard (the points column only ever comes from a genuinely new googly eye), and nothing that would let a stranger click through a pin to everywhere else that account has posted. Anonymous means anonymous, not "anonymous until someone's curious enough to piece it together from public data I made available." Where those two goals ever pulled against each other, I kept picking the quieter one, even when it cost engagement or revenue. It's a map of a nice thing people do, and I'd rather it stayed one.
How it's paid for
The app is free, and stays free. It's funded by ordinary advertising, none of it on the map itself: the map view is never covered by an ad, and nothing interrupts you opening the camera or waiting to hear if a photo was accepted. If you'd rather see none of that at all, there's a single one-off payment that turns ads off for your account permanently. Once, not a subscription. Nothing else in the app costs money, and nothing ever will: posting, browsing, reporting, appealing, all free, always.
Getting in touch
If you want to reach me, see the Contact page. One address, one person reading it.
Last update: 2026-08-25 AWST