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Google Debuts Street View and Mapplets

Posted by kdawson on from the you-can-see-faces dept.

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.

5 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Exit Numbers by Ark42 · · Score: 4, Interesting


    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.

    --
    Morphing Software
  2. Awesome - any landmines? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  3. Yahoo Ad in Times Square by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years by SRA8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Uh Oh by mgblst · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.