What Together does today

The live map

The home page is a map of the world as it is this minute: major cities at world scale, with towns and villages appearing as you zoom in, lit where it is night, with coastlines, rivers and lakes, and no borders drawn.

While you are on it, you appear as an unnamed dot at your nearest large city, or just your country, unless you turn location sharing off. You can also choose to appear with a first name or nickname; that is for adults only, and you are warned first. You can send a wordless wave to another place. You disappear within a minute of leaving.

Pen pals (invite-only beta)

A small number of people have invites. Members appear on the map at a place they choose, as they choose: with their first name and a map picture, as an unnamed dot, or not at all. A member can wave to another member; if they wave back, the two become pen pals and can write letters to each other and compare their places. Passing on a wave is private, and blocking is one tap.

Each pen-pal connection is drawn on the map as a quiet line between the two places, with no names or pictures. Members can hide their lines. Letters are plain text: no links, email addresses or phone numbers in the beta. Face photos are only ever seen by pen pals.

Chats sit along the bottom of the map on larger screens and open as their own panel on a phone. Clicking a tab expands that tab into the active chat window instead of showing both at once. A target tab quietly offers the closest regional room and shows how many active people are there now. Pen-pal chats use the other person's picture when they have shared one, or their place shape when they have not. Other rooms use a simplified shape of their country or continent, so the icons explain the place rather than asking people to decode a symbol.

Active regional rooms also appear over their place on the map as small speech bubbles. A number shows how many recently active people have joined the room, while moving dots say only that somebody is typing. The map never shows who is in the room or what is being typed. A visitor or member can inspect and deliberately join a conversation elsewhere in the world, rather than being added merely for looking.

Visitors who allow the community chat cookie receive an automatic anonymous name and can use regional rooms without making an account. They can choose a temporary name in You, but cannot use the name of a registered member. Pen-pal conversations remain a member feature, keep both chosen names, and remain until either person deletes the conversation for both people. Regional messages disappear after seven days. Messages are screened before delivery and can be reported; ordinary swearing is not treated as a safety problem.

Rank and connect the data

The data room can rank countries across health, opportunity, climate, connection and mutual support, then place any two measures together on a chart. Every measure names its source and period. A relationship in the chart is a pattern, not proof that one thing caused the other.

The map's infrastructure layer adds internet use by country, mapped submarine communications cables crossing the Atlantic, Pacific and other waters, generalised telecom routes, cable landing stations, data centres, and real operating or in-construction gas pipeline routes. Community-mapped infrastructure is incomplete, so a missing route or site never means that none exists. The layer stays off until requested, so its larger local snapshots do not slow down the first view.

Antarctica is part of both map views, with a separate layer for research stations south of 60°S. The stations come from a dated Wikidata snapshot and link back to their community-maintained records.

Connect two places

Pick any two places, by searching, by tapping the map, or with Find me, and Together shows them side by side: the time in each, the hours you are both awake, daylight and seasons, money, climate, food and farming, trade, history, holidays, birds and more. Things they genuinely share are gathered at the top. How comparing works explains the details.

Find me asks your browser for your location once, turns it into the nearest large city on your own device, and keeps nothing else. You can share any comparison with a link that contains only the two places.

What is coming, and what it needs first

None of the following exists yet. I am listing it so you know where Together is going:

• answering a few prompts with a sentence, a sound, a drawing or something you made;
• being introduced to one person because of a real shared fragment, before any names or photographs;
• accepting, passing privately, or blocking, with no one ever told you passed;
• revealing more about yourselves only when both agree, one item at a time.

Before any of that opens, Together needs accounts, blocking and reporting, moderation and a legal review. The safety page lists everything that must exist first.

Follow along

The changelog says what has changed and what comes next, and there is a feed if you would rather be told.