Google Steet View is Live
update: Nov 2008 – this is one of the most popular stories on the blog (if the stats are correct) so I thought I would update it a little bit. Google Street View is a nifty web mapping application that allows you to view actual 3D photos taken from the Google Vehicle Cam of any place the car has imaged. Since Google Street View went live, Google has done its level best to keep potential lawsuits to a minimum by scrubbing out pictures of bikini clad sunbathers, and by removing or air-brushing out anyone who complains that their privacy has been invaded. There are still a lot of cool things to be found using Google Maps or Google Earth and there are several sites that provide a place for folks who are interested in this stuff to collaborate. Google Sightseeing is one such. Back in September, I discovered that the Google cam just happened to image Coopers Lake campground during Pennsic!
Original post (May 31, 2007)
Noticed tonight on Wired that Google Street View is now live on Google Maps, so go check it out. True, it’s not new – Microsoft already had a beta test of their version of this type of thing out. It’s also a bit Orwellian in that it seems like a bit of invasion of personal privacy – allowing voyeuristic users to zoom in on images of real folks caught about their daily business by clicking here and there on a web-based map in a browser. I don’t really like the way it all works so much – you have to look for roads or places that are outlined in BLUE, and then drag a little avatar guy onto that outlined portion of the map. Once you perform this rather cludgey manipulation a video window akin to those 3D Quicktime mov files appears with which you can interact and ‘move’ about the real images of a ’street view’.
Comment posted on 6-2-2007
New York Times article on the privacy issues raised by this service. (free reg required)
Comment posted on 6-3-2007
Here’s a link to a user-contributed list of GSV finds as folks stumble upon them. I’ve noticed that Google is doing some self policing and removing crime scene photos and other potentially litigious images from their archive.
Comment posted on 6-8-2007
Remove yourself from GSV story here
Comment posted on 7-18-2008
[...] been more than a year since I first wrote that Google Street View had quickly turned their otherwise useful 2D web-based mapping into a 3D [...]