Geekfoolery

So, a week or so ago, Google announced that it had increased the size of allowable attachments to email messages in their Gmail service to 20 megabytes, which is swell, and their personalized homepage iGoogle just added a couple new features, and so like I’m sitting here on my second pint of Arrogant Bastard Ale, thinking to myself, “Criminy! It’s already Wednesday, and Google hasn’t announced some new cool and useful feature to one of their many free online services? What is wrong with those slackers up there in Mountain View!”

Then I opened up Google Maps to check out traffic (a feature I now depend on daily in wireless format on my mobile phone to reduce the madness of my morning trek) and while looking up an address in San Francisco, I noticed a new button.

Street View? Yes, Street View. In five cities at the moment you can see panaromic street-level photos of the city anywhere the street map is outlined in blue. That would be New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami. Presumably more cities will follow–the imagery is provided for the most part by a company called Immersive Media. They’ve apparently fitted a small fleet of VW Beetles with GPS equipment and 360-degree panoramic cameras and let them loose on the streets to capture the imagery.

The upshot of this function is that you can look up an address on a Street View enabled section of the map and see what the buildings at that address look like, and then do a virtual walkaround the neighborhood. Arrow keys move you forward and backward, and you can pan around side to side and do a full circle view from one spot. You can cruise the Vegas strip or Times Square or Market Street from your desktop.

And keep in mind this is FREE, people. It still kind of boggles my mind that Mapquest came along very early on as a free Internet tool, and of course since then, Mapquest has improved, and Google has thrown down the competitive gauntlet, starting with maps you could click and drag,  following up the show with Google Earth, myMaps, and now this. I keep waiting for the late night infomercial announcer to say, “NOW how much would you pay?” Except it’s still all free.

OK, in the interest of fairness and balance, Street View is not perfect. Although I can move up and down the streets with arrow keys, it’s a bit slow to load new pics. And I am sure 9 out of 10 people I show this too will ask the same question they asked when they saw Google Satellite or Google Earth–”Is this right now?” No, Virginia, it’s not real time.

Not yet, anyway.

In the meantime, this Flickr user had an idea of what other new services will be coming from Google, perhaps in 20 years time. I am not sure if I hope he is right.

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