What has changed

I have split the town catalogue into geographic chunks, loaded one at a time around the map view. Town dots and local shapes arrive with a short staggered fade; reduced-motion settings show them straight away. The flat map now uses one shape level at a time: city shapes with town dots, then local shapes with city dots.

Public place records, facts and outlines are saved on your device for offline study, with their cache dates shown when you are offline. Facts refresh after 30 days and outlines after seven days, but expiry or a failed refresh does not erase your last saved copy. Once the Offline study panel says the page is ready, you can reopen it without a connection, search towns in saved chunks and read saved reference material. You can clear that study data from the panel. The browser may reclaim storage, and unsaved material, photographs, recordings and live features still need a connection. Chats, accounts and live visitors are not saved in this cache.

I have also softened the city-light edges and made the globe's low-resolution night imagery fade before close zoom stretches it into large pixels. City markers keep their population-based sizes.

I have kept the privacy choices above the chat tabs and study control, so the buttons remain reachable on a phone.

I have made distant city dots smaller, with a clearer population-based size difference in both map views. Their sizes blend as you zoom, and cities stay more prominent than smaller places when those appear.

On the flat map, a matching city shape now replaces its dot earlier, while smaller places remain dots until closer zooms. When smaller shapes take over from an oversized city shape, its city-centre dot returns for orientation. Dots inside shapes remain clickable. This still depends on complete, matching local boundaries being available; I do not invent missing outlines or show country borders.

I found that a dense boundary response could discard every area instead of keeping the complete shapes that fitted. I have narrowed the nearby lookup and fixed that limit. Hyphens and spaces in place names now match consistently, so a sourced village shape can replace its dot. Zooming inside a village also keeps its shape until a smaller area can take over. A slow lookup no longer pauses every other town, although provider-wide limits still apply. Coverage still depends on the available mapping, and a provider outage can still leave dots visible temporarily.

When the provider times out, I now reuse available cached local outlines for up to 30 days instead of throwing them away. Older cached country and regional borders are filtered out before reuse.

Clicking a smaller area now selects that area before its containing city, including when the smaller place has no matching catalogue dot.

Existing outlines also stay on the map while the next nearby lookup loads, so moving between places does not blank shapes we have already fetched.

I have made complete local boundaries into clickable shapes as the flat map gets closer. A city can give way to smaller areas when it becomes too large for the view. City dots and labels are stronger than smaller-place markers while both are visible, and parent-city dots disappear at very close zoom. Country and unclassified state or province borders are excluded; the world map remains about land and people, not national dividing lines.

These shapes depend on OpenStreetMap coverage. I keep a marker when a complete matching outline is missing, and an unmatched area opens its source rather than pretending to be a different town. Boundary loading is bounded around a named place, so this is not a promise of every village outline everywhere. Credits now sit above the clock pills without a background, with full details on hover, keyboard focus or a tap.

I have also stopped using a country's Wikipedia article as a town's introduction. Smaller places now look for an exact GeoNames-to-Wikidata match, and a missing or ambiguous local article is stated plainly. Where that source records a town or borough within the other place's administrative area, the comparison explains that local relationship.

I have added chat avatars, with abstract shapes for guests and anonymous members. Signed-in members can open named members' profiles and wave through the existing pen-pal system. Anonymous identities stay separate, blocked profiles stay closed, and face photos remain for pen pals. Optional social profile links are also for mutual pen pals, with a warning before leaving Together for another network.

Chat tabs keep their positions when opened. The recent chats that fit stay along the bottom, with the rest in Chats, and an expand control lets a conversation use the map space.

You can share a public Connect view or a sourced atlas point to a chat, pen pal or another app. The chooser starts with your open chat, but nothing is sent without your click. Opening a shared point restores the comparison and scrolls to it, with reduced-motion preferences respected. Sourced connections are easier to spot; private answers are never included. Figures can change as their sources are updated.

I have brought the flat map's smaller places onto the 3D globe. Towns and villages appear as you zoom in, nearby places gather into groups, and individual places can be selected to compare. This uses the existing place catalogue, not every settlement in the world, and does not make anyone's public location more precise.

Switching between 2D and 3D now keeps the place at the centre of the clear part of the screen and matches the north-to-south ground scale. I have removed the automatic tilt and jump towards a selected pair when entering 3D. The flat map stays visible until the globe has drawn its first frame. A globe and a flat map still distort space differently, particularly near the poles, and returning from a tilted view restores a north-up map rather than a seamless projection morph.

I have smoothed how the globe reads ground height between elevation pixels, so the camera no longer steps from one pixel's height to the next as you move. I have also stopped drawing the hidden backs of the globe and terrain. Checks now cover steep viewing angles and both sides of the date line, but real-device performance and visible detail transitions still need testing.

I have moved You, Connect and Here into the top bar, where they open the matching sidebar panel. There is no separate Live map link: the map is the main site. Privacy and Changelog are in the footer, and the information pages link straight back to each map panel.

I have also increased how far the flat map can zoom in. Regional outlines load automatically around the selected city or town as you get closer, with finer administrative outlines appearing further in. There is no extra toggle. These come from OpenStreetMap, coverage varies, and they do not change how approximately people appear on Together.

There is a new “Map in words” summary, and a quiet three-stop journey through sourced facts when you compare two places. If two people are sharing a screen, they can also answer one gentle question: both must agree before either answer is shown, and skipping or hiding clears it. Remote pen-pal moments are still to come.

I have started a small place-audio prototype with two attributed London recordings. Nothing plays automatically, and places without reviewed recordings say so. This is a first example, not a claim to represent every voice or place.

The expanded checks also caught a delay in regional chat: newly signed-in members could take about a minute to count as active. I have corrected that so an active room can appear straight away.

I have added a small emote picker to chat, using ordinary Unicode symbols that remain part of the message rather than becoming public reactions or popularity counts. The map also has an optional approximate time-zone layer, showing solar-time bands and their current local times while being honest that real civil borders and daylight-saving rules differ.

The 3D globe now keeps detailed terrain through a wider transition range, judges detail by what a tile actually covers on screen at shallow angles, and uses smaller pixel and tile budgets on modest devices. This should make mountain detail feel steadier as the camera turns without asking low-end phones to do the same work as a large screen.

The smaller lights on the world now lead somewhere. Tap any displayed town or village and it becomes a full Connect destination, with its own population, coordinates, civil timezone, current weather and everything Together can responsibly inherit from its country. Antarctic research stations can be compared too, with their recorded opening details and source. Where a station's civil schedule is not reliably published, Together says clearly that its displayed clock is approximate solar time instead of presenting a guess as fact. These finer places never become anyone's public Live now location.

Community chat now works properly for visitors as well as members. Allow it in the privacy choices and Together gives you a friendly temporary name, then places the nearest regional conversation at the bottom of the map straight away. You can be the first person in the room; it no longer stays hidden while waiting for somebody else to arrive. People who made their privacy choice before visitor chat existed are asked about the new option clearly instead of being silently left without it.

Joining a regional conversation now opens that conversation immediately instead of dropping you back into the chat list and asking you to join again. The updated privacy notice also says plainly when an earlier cookie choice is being replaced, and asks you to agree to the updated cookies.

Together is now much more than a map. Choose any two places and it reveals the human stories between them: shared languages and roots, food and crops, climate and daylight, history, holidays, culture, trade, nature, health, sport, twin towns and much more. Every fact links back to its source, and you can compare up to four places at once or follow their histories on one timeline.

The map itself has become an experience. Switch into a tactile 3D globe with real mountain relief, sunlight, stars, the Sun and Moon in their true positions. Zoom towards the ground for finer coastlines, rivers, glaciers, landscape colour and city lights after dark. Towns and villages now emerge progressively as the map gets closer: busy regions glow together first, then separate into towns and finally individual villages at the deepest views. Together can now travel twice as close as before without making the opening view noisy or revealing anybody's precise location. Watch live aircraft and ships, follow their journeys, explore old maps and ice-age coastlines, or drag countries around the world to discover their true size.

The globe's night can now truly glow. A separate city-lights switch brings in NASA's Black Marble view only when asked, with population-weighted places shining on the dark side of Earth. Smaller places now shine more quietly, and distant towns gather naturally towards their busiest centre instead of sitting in a visible grid. The infrastructure layer traces mapped submarine internet cables across the Atlantic, Pacific and other waters in cyan, telecom routes in purple, mapped landing stations and data centres, operating and in-construction gas pipelines in orange, and the share of people using the internet in each country. Antarctica is back in full, with 144 research stations to discover on both maps. The new data room ranks sourced measures and lets you place two truths together on a chart, always naming the period and warning that a pattern is not proof of a cause.

Together now works beautifully across screens too: stretch one world across several displays, leave it running as a living screensaver, or control a big screen from your phone. A redesigned Live now sidebar keeps the world spacious and can be resized or tucked away whenever the map deserves the whole room; its handle now stays clear of the navigation even when the rail is narrow. Search beside the map's Share control to fly straight to a city or country. Nearby location dots grow towards the pointer, while connection lines illuminate and carry a travelling spark when you approach them. Open a World Heritage Site to see its freely licensed Wikipedia photograph and credit, and share any connection with a made-for-it preview card carrying Together's own type, mark, places and route into Discord and other chats.

The map can now become a shared journey. While somebody is live, a few of the coarse place-to-place connections they have just explored glow faintly on the world and appear beneath their dot. Open one for yourself or follow along as their curiosity moves. The trail disappears with them and is never kept as a history.

The first private beta also opens today. Invited members can create an identity, choose how they appear, wave to people elsewhere and become pen pals when a wave is returned. Pen pals can exchange thoughtful letters and privately share a real photo, while blocking, reporting, downloading and deleting your data remain firmly in your hands. Public map lines show that a connection exists between places, never who the people are.

Chats now sit at the bottom of every page. Pen pals can talk under their chosen names, with a conversation that remains until either person deletes it for both. Members who share a city, country or continent can choose to enter a room once somebody else is there. Anonymous members receive a room-only name, and every regional message disappears after seven days. Browser alerts are optional. Messages are encrypted in storage, screened before delivery for serious safety risks, and reportable without turning ordinary swearing into a crime.

Chat now feels part of the living map instead of part of its sidebar. On a large screen, conversations open over the map with a tab for every joined room; on a phone they become a focused panel of their own. A small target tab offers your nearest regional conversation and shows how many people are active there now, without joining you automatically. Pen pals appear with a shared picture when available, while regional chats use recognisable shapes of their real countries and continents. Direct conversations are clearly private and no longer describe two pen pals as a crowd.

Regional conversations now live on the world itself. When a place room has active members, a small speech bubble floats over that country, city or continent on both the flat map and 3D globe. Its number shows how many active members have joined; bouncing dots reveal that somebody is typing without revealing who or preserving a draft. Tap a bubble to inspect the room and choose whether to join it, even when the conversation is somewhere else in the world. On desktop, the chosen bottom tab now expands into the pinned chat window and disappears as a duplicate, just as a proper chat dock should.

Community chat no longer stops at the account gate. Visitors who allow its cookie receive a friendly automatic anonymous name and can join regional conversations straight away. You can choose a temporary name from You or turn that visitor identity into a full account later. Real member names stay reserved, so a temporary visitor can never pretend to be somebody who has registered. The same encryption, safety screening, reporting and seven-day regional history apply to everybody.

Together went online with one honest promise: help people notice what connects them before borders, politics or prejudice tell them what should divide them.

The first release introduced a living world map showing day and night as they really are. Visitors can appear as an unnamed dot at their nearest large city or country, choose a first name if they want to be seen, and send a simple wordless wave across the world. Nothing reveals an exact location, and closing the page makes you disappear.

Connect made any two places feel closer. It showed the time and season in both, the distance between them, when both people are likely to be awake, and what the Sun and Moon are doing overhead. “Find me” translated a device location into only the nearest large city on the device itself, then forgot the precise position.

From the beginning, Together was designed not to become a dating app, popularity contest or profiling machine. Its privacy controls use plain language, its sources are checked and credited, and its core pages remain useful on slow connections and without JavaScript. The purpose is simple: curiosity first, people first.