Pins
Places that stay put: bathrooms, food, pharmacies, study spaces, charging. Each carries the building, the floor, and how to actually get in.
What's open, busy or flooded right now.
Cite is a live map of your campus and neighbourhood, written by the people standing there. Everything on it expires on its own, so the map is never out of date.
Examples. The map shows what people post near you.
Someone sees it. Everyone nearby knows. Then it's gone.
That is the whole idea. The person at the counter, the flooded corner or the dead lift puts it on the map in a tap, the people around them see it before they walk over, and it leaves once it could no longer be true.
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1
Put it on the map
Pick what it is from a short list and it is up. No form, no account needed to look around.
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2
People nearby see it
Anyone looking at that stretch of the map knows before they make the walk, publicly or only inside your group.
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3
Then it leaves
Every report is born with a lifespan. Nobody has to come back and delete it, so what is left is what is true.
Five things, added by whoever was standing there.
Other maps know where the buildings are. They don't know that the third floor is dead quiet after six, that the north door is the unlocked one, or that the queue has been out the door since noon.
Reports
What's true this afternoon and won't be tomorrow. Every one is born with an expiry.
Area alerts
A report covers a point; an alert covers ground. Flooding, an outage, a road closed, drawn as a circle over the stretch it affects.
Events
Anything at a place and a time. RSVP, see who's coming, and find it under Upcoming on the day.
Reviews
A rating and a sentence, so "there's a bathroom here" becomes "there's a clean one here."
Students. Which study spots are quiet after six, where the sockets are, and which door is the unlocked one.
Locals. The outage, the water lock-off and the road nobody is getting through, on the streets you use.
Private groups. A flat, a class, a crew: its own pins and reports over the same streets, seen by nobody outside it.
Where it is, and what it's like right now.
A pin says the place exists. A status says what it's like this minute: whether the queue is out the door, whether the ATM still has cash, whether the lift is working. Every one is chosen from a list rather than typed, so busy means the same thing at every counter on campus and two places can be compared without reading two paragraphs.
Setting one is a tap on the way past, which is the only reason anybody ever does it. And a status expires like everything else here, so a queue that has gone does not sit there all week saying it hasn't.
How busy it is
Quiet
Moderate
Busy
Packed
The canteen
Open
Crowded
Slow service
Out of stock
The ATM
Out of cash
Long queue
Card only
Working again
Getting in
Elevator out
Ramp blocked
Door issue
Search
47A1
47
Building
A
Floor
1
Room
Building 47, first floor, room 1.
Your timetable says 47A1. The map knows where that is.
Turn on campus mode and the map scopes itself to the grounds you're standing on. UTech and UWI Mona are both traced from their real outlines rather than a box drawn around them, and walking routes are worked out on the phone from the buildings themselves, so they still work on the third floor with no signal.
At UTech a timetable code is something you can search. 47A1 resolves to building 47 and walks you to it, and it says out loud that the letter is a floor, which is the half of the code nobody ever explains. Mona numbers its rooms differently, so the decoder stays quiet there rather than guessing at somebody else's convention.
Straight from the App Store.
The ten screens people see before they download it, in the order the store shows them.
Nobody comes back to delete things.
That's how every community map rots. So on Cite nothing temporary has to be cleaned up by hand. A report is filed with a lifespan matched to how long it could plausibly still be true, and when that runs out it leaves on its own. Replies extend it. Silence doesn't.
Pins are permanent, so they get asked instead. Every pin carries one question. Is this still accurate? Two taps to answer it.
| Kind | Lifespan |
|---|---|
| Food status | 6 hours |
| General | 12 hours |
| Hazard | 24 hours |
| Safety | 48 hours |
| Accessibility | 3 days |
| Campus update | 7 days |
Public, or just your people.
Some things belong on the open map. Some belong to five people and nobody else. One switch decides which, and it sits at the top of the map rather than inside settings, so you always know which map you're adding to before you add to it.
A group is a private layer over the same streets: its own pins, its own reports, visible to its members and no one else.
Run one of these places? Say what is true at your counter.
People are already posting your queue, your stock and your card machine. Claim your place and it is you setting what is true there, with your hours, your menu and your events on the pin.
One tap sets it, you choose how long it holds, and it clears itself when that runs out, so the map never says you are open at midnight.
Your place, on the map
Open
8hleft on the map
Patties fresh at noon
It's on the App Store.
Free, and worth something the first time you open it: the map is already carrying what people put on it today.
No account needed to look around.
On Android?
Leave an email and we will send one message the day it opens there. That is the only thing the address is for.
Free A note now to confirm it, then one message when Android opens. We will not sell or share your address.