Google comes back to earth

After Wednesdays announcement that google skies was available in google earth, the firm is now concentrating on matters closer to home. Street level in fact.

Google maps has a new street view feature, which enables the user to look at navigable photographs of roads in nine major cities in the US. These include: San Francisco, New York and Denver. The street view link is on the right hand corner of google maps.

To take the photographs, Google drove round the streets with cameras strapped on vehicle roofs in San Diego and San Fransisco taking high resolution photogrpahs. The other seven cities were snapped by other companies and are showing as low resolution images. The photographic technology was supplied by Immersive Media

I can see more advertising opportunities, which is inevitable, that said the street level images are of additional value to google maps, providing visualisation at an unprecedented access level.

The service offering continues Googles strategy of targetting localised businesses and communities, as part of the google maps proposition.

This is becoming a crowded market. Street view is not the first of its kind. Amazon, abandoned a similar project. Microsoft offers a Birds eye view, in Live virtual earth, which isn’t to street level, though there is a preview available of parts of Seattle at street level.

There are smaller players, without the financial muscle of microsoft or google, who have developed small areas at street leve, these include Everyscape.com

According to Stephen Chau, Google Maps product manager, there are policies in place for updating aerial images on a regular basis, which could set a precedent for street view updates

~ by anarchyintheuk on August 24, 2007.