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Google Maps unveiled a new feature Tuesday called “Street Views”, which as you may guess, gives you a real life street image of addresses entered into Google maps.
I gave it a test run and typed in “78th and 2nd, 10021″ and found the addresses it offered back were slightly off — I went through a few news stories via Google news on “Street Views” and found some similar user experiences – but the images of the building, street, etc. are dead accurate.
Pretty scary and insanely cool at the same time. Here’s the image:
Girlfriend came home last night and said she and her friends at work were using the “Street Views” yesterday with basically the same results (Girlfriend says the street #s weren’t off as bad).
The two-dimensional “Street Views” is currently offered in five cities, allowing users a navigation of New York City (nice), San Francisco (ditto), Las Vegas (um…why? to get an awesome shot of the street hookers?), Miami (you’d prob get a better user rate if you’d launched the service in the middle of the ocean) and Denver (that’s a shame, i’m pretty sure Colorado doesn’t have the Internet yet.).
I’m not sure why smart cities like Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Austin, Texas weren’t involved in the roll-out, but if you take everyone in the Google orgainzation combined, they’re probably, all together, smarter than me. So, I’ll assume those cities (and prob everywhere else) are coming.
The Google “Street Views” announcement was made at the Where 2.0 conference held this week in San Jose, Calif. The effort seems to be in response to Microsoft’s “Virtual Earth” which was revealed last year.
