Bing has unveiled some changes to Bing Maps today that give users a much better view of the street. The newly improved Streetside feature in Bing Maps doesn't just show you the street, but lets you pan up and down it with a seamless, panoramic view of the surrounding location.

In unveiling the update, Microsoft said, "In the past you explored Streetside imagery by navigating between 'bubbles,' or discrete 360 degree views, and moving down the street was accomplished by jumping from bubble to bubble."

Now the navigation through the map is smoother, and you can easily pan up and down the street. Above the street view is a map so you can keep track of where you are via the visual cues from the photography or via a more traditional map of streets and addresses.

This new feature is the result of technology developed by Microsoft Research's Street Slide project, which ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick called "better than Google Street View" when he wrote about a video demo of the technology last year. For its part, Google has sent its Street View vehicle all over the world, raising numerous privacy concerns along the way. Bing Maps' Streetside isn't available everywhere yet, but if Microsoft wants to take on Google in this realm, it will have to make sure its mapping cars aren't too far behind.

It's a little hard to describe, but check out the video below. In addition to being less disorienting than zooming around inside Street View, the open space opened up for annotation in Street Slide is very nice.

Doesn't that just make you feel like a whole new world of possibilities are opened up? There's no word whether or when this feature will be added to Bing, but if it is - I'm going to try to train myself to use Bing Maps instead of Google Maps.

Blogger Keir Clarke hacked together some proof of concept demos similar to this yesterday, using Google Maps, photoshop and jQuery. They're not bad for a few hours of work!

From these sorts of experiments to the work of Open Heat Map and Tableau that we've highlighted here, it's exciting to think about where all this malleability of maps could lead.

But what if you actually have talent? Songsmith could be of potential use to you, too.

"Songwriters can use Songsmith as an 'intelligent scratchpad' to work with new melodies, quickly turning your scratch recordings of new ideas into richer, deeper explorations. Musicians can also play instruments right into Songsmith, instead of singing."

No doubt a great deal of research went into the development of the product, and it probably has some very interesting potential applications. But, I must admit, after watching the promo video, I'm having a hard time clearing my head enough to figure out what those uses might be.

Who knows? This might be another one of those Seinfeld things.

Scoble has just posted an interview and demo with two researchers from Microsoft - who coincidentally also star in the promo video. They provide additional insight on the product and highlight some of its potential applications.

Interested users can download a trial version from Microsoft Research. The product is available for purchase for $29.95 US.

Something tells me that the American Idol tryouts just got a lot more interesting.

We've embedded the demo video below because the product is likely to be one of historic proportions and we thought our readers would appreciate the opportunity to see it.

The video below gets into the action with live screens of the Telescope about 25% of the way through. A basic discussion of the technical requirements, with engineer David Fay, starts about 80% of the way through (sorry, the FC video player is awful so now time stamps are available). Full screen view, in the bottom right, is pretty good.