Its been more than a year since I first wrote that Street View had quickly turned Google’s otherwise slick and useful 2D web-based mapping into a 3D street-level peep-show par excellance. Since then I’ve had an image in my mind of a white van with the Google logo on it cruising around imaging all those streets for some reason. I guess if I had been really interested I would have found some stories like this one that revealed early on that they were actually using a VW bug, but I didn’t know that. When I discovered a couple street view images with the car still in the image, I thought I had discovered some big secret…
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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’.

I wondered how long it would be after Google went public that we’d start to see the flashing, annoying image ads on their site. It appears that we will not be long to wait: I read this morning in the NYT (free reg req) that Google will start selling image style ads to appear on it’s downstream customer’s sites (like NYT). The change will not affect google.com (the search engine), at least not at this time. It’s not clear how folks who have included the generally inoffensive text ads on their site will feel about the change, but it’s pretty clear that Google’s investors are more concerned with profits than remaining inoffensive.I’ve been a Google fan for years. I thought the whole concept of a bunch of really smart guys (and gals?) sitting around coding new ways to search the web was cool. It also served a vital function: The search engines before Google sucked. AltaVista, Lycos, even Yahoo were piss poor at finding things that were even part-ways related to what I had typed in, but Google seemed actually to have worked. Then when they bought out the usenet archive - you had no choice but to use Google - most of the answers to your computer related questions were in that archive.

I was both excited for Google and saddened for myself when they went public because I saw it as the beginning of the end. Sure, Google may succeed and get even more powerful than Microsoft someday - but that spark of coolness that was Google when I first found them will be long dead (at least for me).