Mar 282008
Google debuted Street View in Google Maps last May, but it arrived in Austin yesterday along with 12 other cities and Yosemite Natl. Park. Click here to go to the map of Austin. The blue areas (or blue outlined streets) are the areas where Street View is available. I just looked at my house. Creepy!
7 Responses to “Google Maps Adds Street View to Austin”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I’ve heard a lot of people today say that they think it’s creepy, too. I think that the satellite views really show a lot more, particularly as to yards to the side and rear and, extrapolating from rooflines and so forth, what is a building’s layout. On tree-lined residential streets, at least the ones checked so far, not much is visible from the angle from which the views are taken. A bit more may be seen at corners, where the City enforces some intersection visibility. The disclaimer about approximate addresses really is important, too, because the map-system gives bad results where intersections are jogged and in all cases where the building across the street has a different number prefix from that of its opposite neighbor. It is fun to see the little person-ette face different directions as s/he is moved from one location to another.
It is creepy, but it gets a little less creepy if you realize that this is a really, really old picture of our streets. Its like imagining the world looking at your car in your driveway through a time machine and they are really looking at these details five years ago. Best I can tell, based on the fact that there is an entirely new neighborhood built behind my house (not in this photo) and a pond in my backyard (not in this photo) and deck on my house (which is definitely there in the photo) and a car in the drive that we haven’t had in years — that this photo is from maybe 2002. So the whole world is looking at your house and your stuff the way it looked one day sometime in maybe 2002. That is mostly just a little weird.
The satellite photos are 2003 or older. If you look downtown, the Frost Bank building, the new city hall, and the convention center Hilton are all not completed.
However, I think the street view photos are from this past holiday season.
The street-map pictures, at least for some parts of town, were taken during Halloween season, because some people in the newer, less forested parts of town, can recognize their decorations.
They must’ve done the Street View shots over a few months then. It would take them a while to cover the whole city. Just saying that the Satellite photos are several years older than the Street View photos.
Here’s an article from Popular Mechanics about how they do got the photos: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4232286.html.
1st instance (of likely many) of Leslie has been found:
http://tinyurl.com/yw3tuw