Google Steet View is Live
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 [...]