Thank You for an Incredible Year!

Connections & celebrations
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The image features diverse collaborating Local Guides in a vibrant and uplifting scene celebrating community and achievements.
The image features diverse collaborating Local Guides in a vibrant and uplifting scene celebrating community and achievements.1920×1080 362 KB

2024 has been a year like no other for the Leaderboards—a year filled with remarkable milestones, innovative new features, and a shared spirit of growth and transformation. From celebrating our 4th anniversary to launching exciting new features like the Star Media Views History tables that spruce up your star media postson Connect and “seamlessly” migrating to a new and enhanced Connect platform, we’ve embraced every challenge with resilience, patience and innovation.

But at the heart of it all was our unwavering mission: empowering Local Guides like you to gain deeper insights into your contributions on Google Maps. With better visibility into your achievements, the Leaderboards aimed to inspire you to grow your impact—earning more points, achieving more views, and amplifying your influence on your community. And all this was done with a touch of friendly competition and a whole lot of engagement, discussion and fun!

A Journey Fueled by Your Local Guide Passion and Dedication

Every milestone we reached was powered by you. Your passion, your needs, and your success drove every step we took. After all, as you grow, the Leaderboards grow—and we’ve built this platform patiently, one achievement, one feature, one step at a time.

It all began in January 2020 with a simple, yet profound question: “Which is our most-viewed single photo?” This spark of curiosity ignited the creation of the Leaderboards of the Most Viewed Photos, attracting an intense discussion and overwhelming response from our enthusiastic community - 596 comments and 351 likes, a testament to your enthusiasm, curiosity and passion to learn more and grow.

Since then, the journey has been nothing short of extraordinary. From that modest beginning, we’ve expanded to include leaderboards for eight unique aspects of Local Guide contributions: Local Guide Points, Photo Views, Video Views, and the most viewed photos, videos, and 360 spheres, along with that playing field leveler, contributions by country. We also introduced the dynamic Movers & Shakers leaderboards, spotlighting the most active Local Guides each month and year across all contribution metrics.

Celebrating Your Extraordinary Achievements

The true stars of this journey are you, the Local Guides. Your achievements speak volumes, and the remarkable numbers tell a story of impact and dedication. I mean check this out! For the top 100 Local Guides alone in 2024:

and over the next few days I’ll add the numbers for December. These staggering numbers represent not just data but stories of effort, excellence, dedication, passion and the powerful impact you have made on communities worldwide. So hats off to every single one of you! And don’t forget, in early January we will announce the 2024 movers and shakers!

Here’s to the Next Chapter

As we look ahead towards 2025, let’s continue building, innovating, and growing together. The year 2024 has shown us the incredible things we can achieve when passion meets purpose. I’m excited for the new adventures, Leaderboard innovations (some already in the pipeline), and milestones that await us.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being a part of this incredible journey. Let’s keep achieving and climbing higher together and together we can!

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Thank you for all your support and guidance. Happy Holidays @AdamGT it was indeed a learning experience and a great year
Regards,

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Loved reading this @AdamGT. Great bullet points on the top 100 Local Guides cumulative numbers. It just goes to show how all our efforts together can make such an impact. Always nice to see your posts friend. :heart:

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@AZ_2021 জনাব ধন্যবাদ

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@AdamGT Thank you for the inspiring message and for celebrating our journey as Local Guides! The new features and milestones of 2024 have truly motivated us to contribute more and make a positive impact. I’m excited to see what 2025 holds as we continue growing together. Here’s to achieving even greater heights—together we can!

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Thank you @AdamGT very much for the commitment you let flow into the leaderboards. This is such a great project, motivates every single participant and brings us forward together as a community. I’m looking forward to the new year as a local guide.

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@AdamGT I would like to express my deepest gratitude to you for your vision, your words of encouragement, and the guidance you have provided to us. Your style of leadership inspires us every day.New year wishes in advance to you.

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@AdamGT

Надзвычайны пост!
Вы вельмі шмат робіце для супольнасці, дазваляючы нам падарожнічаць па табліцах і атрымліваць станоўчыя эмоцыі.
Вашай увазе і цярпенню да нас - няма мяжы.
Вялікі дзякуй!!!
Крэатыву вам і пазітыву!!!

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Thanks for this review of the past year, Adam. I love your closing statement confirming that we can, because at one time I almost thought I couldn’t.

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Thank you so much for this so informative post @AdamGT

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Herzlichen Dank für deinen besonderen statistischen Jahresüberblick @AdamGT ich wünsche einen guten Übergang ins das neue Jahr 2025​:fireworks::confetti_ball::tada::fireworks:

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Thank you, dear @AdamGT, for sharing your valuable insights. I sincerely appreciate your dedication and hard work in posting the monthly leaderboards and achieving some new milestones in 2024, including:

  • History Tables for Star Media’s
  • Stats Summary:
  • Improved Leaderboards Index:
  • Seamless Migration to New Connect in October
  • VIRTUAL MEET-UP - Top 100 Local Guides Leaderboards, what’s next! in July.

I hope the Top 100 system continues inspiring Local Guides to improve their quality of contributions to Google Maps.

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It should read thank you @AdamGT for all the hard work, long nights and days. I hope sometimes you look back and realize how these leaderboards have motivated us, informed us and taught us. I have and am still learning so much.

It was fun to read the original post about our Star photo. I enjoyed seeing my Foodie photo which was my first 1 million views Star Photo. In that original post I saw some familiar names, @tony_b and @TravellerG .

Again thank you Adam for what you have accomplished here in Connect.

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Thank you so much @AdamGT for conceiving such a wonderful concept and giving us a unique platform to Show & Shine our contributions.

As you always say, Leaderboard is not meant to create a competition and I fully concur with this thought. This system helps the participants get inspired from each other while showcasing their own contributions.

Just by participating and contributing to this system, there is enough to learn and practice to make our post/contribution shine. I am just quoting two examples here but there are many.

  1. This system has given us the fantastic way of writing caption (which is system generated) to our photo.
  2. How to find the number of your hidden contributions.

These all are implicit and nowhere explicitly vouched for but as an user of this system one can appreciate such implicit learning which explicitly they apply on Connect.

We have seen the success journey of this system since year 2020 as mentioned here,

but that’s not the end of the road. The improvement cycle is still running and on its pace. The recent improvement in the year 2024 about introducing the Star Views Table is a great example of this system operating at performing level.

We are grateful to you @AdamGT for your persistent and tireless work you do for Local Guides.

Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! :pray::pray::pray:

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@AdamGT thanks for being such an incredible ambassador for all things Google Maps and your inspirational contributions and leadership example on Connect and with the Top 100. You invited me along on our journey to promote good practice and to showcase the best of our local communities helping businesses and society with our contributions. I am most grateful to be part of this incredible group of local guides and excited about the future and what it will bring for us. Thanks to you and others in this community you’ve introduced to me (you know how you are !), I have picked up so much and enjoy my communications with this amazing world of inspiring local guides.

Happy Hogmanay as they say north of the border in my place of birth, Scotland. Feliz aninovo in Galician in my adopted village of Ribadavia, Ourense, Spain. Thanks to a public vote Ferrero Rocher declared us in 2024 as the best village in Spain!

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Dear & respected Terry Ji…
Thanks for remembering me and mentioning me…
Most sincerely
:handshake::gift_heart:

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I appreciate everything you have done for the local guide and T 100 team here in Connect, specially i can say you can proud my climbing efforts in between millions of local Guides in worldwide Here
Happy Holiday & 2025 to you & your :houses: :pray: @AdamGT sir :bouquet:

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Thank you @AdamGT for the commitment with the leaderboards. :grinning:

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Hay @Mo_TravelleerX after very long time

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wuhuuuuuuu… 2024 is INCREDIBLE indeed @AdamGT … For me personally, this has been a very colorful and rewarding year, with may achievements and blessings, including in Google Maps and Connect!

I know I have been on et off here and there but I will always support and be part of the top 100 Local Guides journey with so many awesome and inspiring LGs! Here’s to brilliant 2025 and see you sooooon

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