Has StreetView Reached Your Neighborhood?
Zoli was happy to discover that Google’s Street View cars had made it into his former home town, the small suburb of Pleasanton, California (population: 67,724) and snapped pictures of his former house. Street View has made it into some obscure places, like the inside of tunnels or the parking lot roads of Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
If you live in a small area, and Street View has made it to you, let me know. Queens is hardly small, but my immediate neighborhood has supposedly 38,216 people (in a borough of 2 million and a city of 8 million) and Google hasn’t made it here. The closest Street View vehicle was 8 blocks away, in the park, and I hope they return eventually.
There’s one other question I’ve been asking lately: Is there any real value to Street View? Now that Google’s Local Business Referrals are putting pictures of storefronts into Google Maps, do we need cars driving around, taking pictures of random useless people on the street and then blurring them back out of the pictures? Street View is supposed to help us find businesses, not sightsee, as far as I know, so why not put more effort into storefronts and less into taking pictures of everything?
I heard that a buggy was in South Padre Island, TX. About 45 minutes from here. Pretty cool. We in deep south texas. Any more south and we’d be mexico!
Comment by sal | December 6, 2007
‘course it’s still useful
you can look at landmarks & find places to go visit (for tourists)
- imma
Comment by imma | December 7, 2007
street view is incredibly useful. i use it often - anytime i need to roll out to someplace on the sh*t stripmall that is el camino real (and most of this ugly country). place could be three blocks away, but without street view, you’d roll right by it a hundred times.
Comment by Peter | December 9, 2007