A world map you can walk into, and routes worth following

WalkSpy has always been about people sharing their cities and trails on foot. The piece that was missing was a good way to find those walks, and a way to nudge each other toward routes worth doing. Today's release adds both.

A real world map

The Browse page is now a working interactive world map. Open it and you will see every country with walks on it, sized by how many walks have been recorded there. Click a country to choose: zoom in to look around, or open the full country page with the recent walks gallery and city breakdown.

Pinned on the map are recommended walking routes, color-coded by difficulty. Some are seawalls and waterfront strolls; some are heritage trails and harbour bridges. You can read the basics in a popup or open any of them for the full route page.

Live walkers show up as pulsing red dots while they are broadcasting. If anyone is out walking right now, you will see them on the map and you can drop straight into the stream with one click.

A side panel lets you turn each layer on and off. Want to look at recommended routes only, without the noise of country circles? Toggle off countries. Want to see only who is live? Hide the rest. There is a "Fit world" button to zoom back out whenever you wander too far in.

If you want to share a specific country view with someone, append ?country=CA (or any country code) to the URL and the map will fit that country's bounds when it opens.

Guided Mode: walking a recommended route

Up to now, recommended routes have been read-only inspiration. From today, you can walk one.

Every recommended route page has a new "Walk this route" button. Tap it and you go straight into the start-walk flow with the route's name pre-filled and a "Following" badge attached to the live page. Your viewers see the badge too, which links back to the recommended route, so anyone watching can read along with where you are.

When you finish, your walk is saved with a permanent link to the recommended route it followed. The recommended route's page picks up a new "Walked by" gallery showing every walker who has done it, so the route becomes a living archive of how different people experience the same path.

We are deliberately starting Guided Mode small. For routes that have a full path traced, we will overlay it on your live map alongside your real position in a follow-up release. For routes that only have a start point, we drop a flag at the start and link your walk to the route. Either way, the connection is real and persists.

Why we built this together

Discovery and recommendation sit on top of each other. A great map is only useful if there is something on it worth doing, and a great list of recommendations is only useful if you can find your way to one. Browse and Guided Mode are deliberately the same release: one is where you find a route, the other is how you walk it.

If you walk a recommended route, your version becomes part of how the next walker decides whether to do it. That is the kind of feedback loop we want everywhere on WalkSpy.

Open Browse and have a look around. If you find something you want to walk, tap "Walk this route" and we will see you out there.