Trick or treat evening is just a couple of days away and if your neighborhood is heavily into that stuff, you may want to start a campaign that everyone get on the Nextdoor app if you and your neighbors haven’t yet. This will make it easier to plan your routes if you have kids trick or treating and also to let your neighbors know what you’ll be doing at your house for October 31. The private social network for neighborhoods is actually powered by the Google Maps Platform and Google is giving it a slight push this Halloween.
The app has an annual Halloween Treat Map which lets everyone in the neighborhood know what everyone’s up to this October 31. Owners can mark their houses using different icons: a candy corn icon if they will be passing out candy to trick or treaters, a haunted house icon if they will dress up their house to scare kids or give out spooky treats, or a teal pumpkin icon if they will be giving out non-food treats.
Wait, what do you mean non-food treats? Isn’t the spirit of Halloween all those chocolates and candies? Well, not all kids can (or should be) partake of those sweet treats since one out of 13 children have some sort of allergy to food. So having an alternative, non-food treat can make those kids that can’t have candy still feel like they’re part of this fun holiday.
It would be nice of course if Google Maps itself would have this information on their app but of course there are a lot of privacy and security concerns if they will bring a feature like this. So good thing there are third-party apps that can leverage on their SDK but bring it to a more private setting just for their own neighborhood.
Currently, there are over 210,000 who use this free and private social network app. You can download it for free from the Google Play Store.
SOURCE: Google
