Google Debuts Street View and Mapplets

Today at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference Google unveiled two new map features. An O'Reilly blogger describes Street View, which uses 360-degree street-level video from Immersive Media to enable neighborhood walk-throughs in (for now) a few selected areas. The other new feature is Mapplets, which let you embed Google Maps mashups in any Web page. Much more coverage is linked from TechMeme.

Comments

Exit Numbers

[Ark42]

Thats all great and stuff, but when will they add exit numbers? It's a pretty basic thing along the lines of labeling road names as far as I'm concerned.

Awesome - any landmines?

[Anonymous Coward]

These street views are amazing. Some of the shots are pretty high res - people on streets, through windows - I bet if you look hard enough you could see inside of people's homes - hmm, a new crop of google treasure hunts - find the guy in his window. How many people can you find breaking traffic laws? Hmm, how many people will go look up their cities and find their bfriend's car in front of a stranger's place! ;) so many fun things...

Are there any potential privacy laws google could break by making these photos so readily available online?

Re:Awesome - any landmines?

[flyingsquid]

I found a pretty cool Easter egg on Google Earth the other day, while digitally roaming through the Gobi Desert. Fire up Google Earth and click "fly to" and then paste in the coordinates 40.4026777778, 99.7833888889 , which will take you to Inner Mongolia. You can see a couple of Badger bombers, Antonov An-12 transports, a Beriev A-50 AWACS plane, some Mig-19s, a couple of Mig-21 Fishbeds, and a few cool-as-all-hell Mig-29 Flankers. Not that I know that much about Russian-made aircraft, I was simply able to figure out what they were using (what else?) Google. It's a pretty amazing tool, though the Chinese must be pissed that so many of their military establishments can now be checked out by anyone with an internet connection...

Yahoo Ad in Times Square

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the street view of Times Square and what do you see? A big billboard for Yahoo.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=37.84883 3,-122.420654&sspn=1.051842,1.867676&ie=UTF8&om=0& layer=c&cbll=40.756663,-73.986495&cbp=1,156.292682 926829,0.5,0&ll=40.763544,-73.987255&spn=0.013392, 0.031028&z=15

I know Google themselves didn't collect the data, but it's still kind of amusing.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[SRA8]

Much like Windows Media Player, the Microsoft site was poorly designed, clunky, wasted precious screen real estate, and doesnt work around the typical user queries. Google's version almost predicts the features I want and works accordingly. I'm not purposely MSFT-bashing, its just that the difference is vast.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[Anonymous Coward]

I was always curious about what was happening with Microsoft's project. Last year I was at my parents' house in Philadelphia about 11 miles from the city center and in an area of no real interest and I saw a black SUV drive by with a large 4-way camera mounted on the roof and the Windows Live logo on the back. It was apparently driving up and down the streets in the neighborhood. While the site has not changed at all I would be surprised if MS abandoned this project given the resources they must have sunk into it. Maybe they're just waiting until they get a certain number of cities or decent area covered first? Who knows. Interesting concept, though.

I can see my dog.

[Anonymous Coward]

I typed in my own address, and by zooming in all the way on the street view photo, I was able to very clearly see my dog sitting in the window, staring directly at the camera. Scary.

Got stuck in traffic in brooklyn

[Tharkban]

search for "500 State Street Brooklyn NY" and move west along state street. The camera gets stuck in traffic and the address keeps moving along. Additionally, 500 State Street isn't what it's supposed to be http://www.mro.org/firelotus/firelotus/index.shtml . It's cool and all that they did this, but I'm not impressed with it's usefulness.

Re:How is that the norm at all?

[kisielk]

I'm a photographer. I shoot people on the street all the time. I've yet to ever have anyone get angry or hostile at me for taking their photograph. In fact, many people actually enjoy having their photo taken and will react positively if you point your camera at them. Most of the rest just assume you must be trying to photograph something else and they're standing in the way, so they'll do their best to move. I'm not aware of any "social norm" neither here in Canada nor in Japan where I lived that dictates you shouldn't take photographs of people in public.

Re:Uh Oh

[mgblst]

You make a decent point. But the way something like Big Brother comes in, is as in most changes to society, it creeps in.

No matter how you look at it, this is a loss of privacy. 20 years ago, you could expect to walk in a public place, and there would be no record of you ever being there. Now, in places like the UK, you are captured all the time, and these recrods can be kept for a long time. So we have lost privacy going out in a public place. The next step is some form of recognition software that can track individuals, everywhere they go.

So where do you draw the line? When do YOU start to get upset. Or are you one of these people who are happy for the government and private industry to know where you are at all times? If that doesn't bother you (whether you never do anything wrong or not), then you have a problem. If that doesn't bother most people in this world (and I think it won't), then we all have a problem.