My friend Dimitry has a post detailing the newest Google Maps feature – Street View. As the name implies, you can see an area at the street level as opposed to up above with traditional satellite views. At the moment, Street View is only for Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. Update: Google Maps also has a new feature called maplets, which are like Google Gadgets placed on your map as Kristen Nicole says.
In addition, Microsoft rolled out their “Live Search Maps 3-D” feature, starting with New York, Austin, Cape Coral, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Savannah, Tampa and a few other notable cities.
Microsoft® Live Search Maps will today begin offering three-dimensional, photo-realistic views of New York City buildings and landscapes, with perspectives that few people — apart from Superman — have ever seen. The free online service will provide a unique look at many of New York’s iconic locations, along with local listings, ratings and reviews and driving directions to help people easily find, discover, plan and share relevant location information that is important to them on the Web.
Play around with the new features at maps.google.com and maps.live.com respectively. If you’re wondering how there can be two new map feature announcements from both Google and Microsoft on the same day, it’s all part of the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference going on today and tomorrow in San Jose, California.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Hrm tried out the sample link (Moscone Center) but no street view button shows up, do you have to enable something?
You will need Flash 9 for your browser. holy cow, this is awesome! I wonder if there is any way to see which cities will be next—-when is Minneapolis going to be available?
This a really useful tool. The possibilities of this when it goes global are immense. Image getting up google maps on my iPhone for the street i am stood in and then being able to plan a route with Google maps showing you what you should see on the ground on the phone.
Awesome
Dave
whoa! you can litterally drive around the streets of new york! amazing!
I like the new Google maps features(my fav maps webapp) but I don’t see how it would be useful for me.
Paul,
This post keeps showing up as a new post in Bloglines. I know you’ve had this issue before, but I just wanted to bring it to your attention again. Hopefully you can figure out why this keeps occurring.
@k1ng – yeah, as you’ve said it’s happened before in bloglines. I have gone through my feed code for any syntax/etc error and it’s flawless. Honestly, I just think it’s bloglines or something. =/ I hear Google Reader is nice.. ;-)