Google Maps and Street View Undergo Awesome Redesign
Google Maps underwent a major redesign today and the new street view is pretty fantastic. Now users can drag a little human figure named "Pegman" over any streets that light up blue and get a preview of Street View for that location. When Pegman lands, the whole map view turns into a Street View viewer and there's a button to expand that view to take up the whole horizontal length of your browser.
These are very welcome changes that really help take advantage of the eye candy that is Street View in Google Maps. There's a whole lot of changes that were made today, all with the long-term fight for map users and their ad-viewing eyeballs in mind we're sure. Today's changes are great, though.
Map search is a heated competition between Google, Microsoft, MapQuest (now with OpenID, by the way) and a handful of other consumer market competitors. That competition goes on in both features like this and in image quality.
Why invest time and resources into making map search interfaces better? Because someday this is expected to be a very commercialized part of search. Once this kind of experience becomes widely available on touch-screen mobile devices, expect to see ads all over and even more innovation come to online mapping.
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It looks a lot like the version that's on the iPhone now. Very cool, very slick. It's not a stretch to imagine all the amazing things you'll be able to do with geotagging, etc in the near future.
Man, Google's Street View continues to amaze me. First, we get it on our computers, then the iPhone, and now they improve it even more... not really looking forward to seeing ads on the maps, but I don't doubt it's coming
This is what I like most about Google. Really impressive!
Bye!
Nice, although there doesn't seem to be anything blue in London
Cool! Now, I can't wait untill they get the UK Street View Data Online!
htp://streetviewgallery.corank.com
Looks like some good changes. In times past, I never really liked google's mapping system.
i dont like the new changes in google street is very hard to see what places have street view
Redesigns are fine, but it’s unfortunate they aren’t the changes for which concerned parents are actually asking. They are, however, asking that images of children and areas where they congregate be taken down from Street View. Internet predators already abuse applications like MySpace and Facebook, let’s not give them another tool to reach our kids. Especially one that provides 360 degree views of our neighborhoods, where kids can be memorialized in association with a physical address
PATENT REQUEST:-) "SYSTEM AND METHOD OF GEOGRAPHIC AND LINGUISTIC ORIENTATION TO FACILITATE THE NAVIGATION IN THE INTERNET"
* Published -- with international search report
* Copyright © 2000 - Patent Pending 8 march 2000: http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/ia.jsp?ia=IB2001/000339
* It's more of 5 years global internet antecipation.
The new changed to Street View make it much harder to determine which streets have a street view. You all know we used to be able to just click the Street View button and everywhere it was available turned blue. Now, you have to enable it and hope for the best.
Unless I am missing something in the configuration or use of the product.
It's a little better but they dropped an important nugget of functionality that they shouldn't have in my opinion.