Google Maps Street View goes live

by Brad Linder May 29th 2007

Google has launched its new "Street View" feature for Google Maps, and it's pretty sweet. We'd post a picture, but a video is worth a thousand words... or pictures in this case. Here's a video from Barry Schwartz showing a Street View of the area around his office building in Suffern, NY.

Basically, the Google Maps toolbar is getting a little more crowded, with a new "Street View" button next to "traffic." When you click the button, certain streets in covered areas (such as New York and San Francisco) will turn blue, and a little yellow man shows up on the screen. Click the yellow dude and drag him over to a blue street to view a street-level image.

Once you've got the street view, you can click on arrow buttons to move forward or backward. Click elsewhere on the image and drag left or right to change your angle. All the images cover 360 degrees.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Tags: google maps, GoogleMaps, street view, StreetView

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Victor Agreda, Jr. said 2:25PM on 5-29-2007

This is frickin' awesome, been playing with it for much of the day. There has always been this disconnect in cities like NYC, between the top-view of a map and the ground-view of buildings as you're seeing them. So now I can plot a course, and actually look for landmarks as simple as that Quizno's they have on the demo location. Super-cool. Bet this is nice on an iphone :)

Todd said 2:43PM on 5-29-2007

Funny you should mention this new "Street View" being used on the iPhone, Mr. Agreda...

The iPhone is NOT 3G. So there is no way for these images to load fast enough to make "street view" useful. If a later version comes out with 3G, then yeah it would be cool.

But more interestingly, Google could simply buy the soon to be for sale 700MHz spectrum and give away its own, Google branded phone that shows the "street view" as quickly as is appears on a desktop computer. Infact it could "animate" these images.

DontBelieveTheTodd said 9:10PM on 5-29-2007

Nice FUD, Todd.

I tried this on my dial-up connection and it worked fine. Not super-fast, but fine. The iPhone, though not 3G, is several times faster than my modem. Thus, this could work fine on the iPhone, if it is included in iPhone's version of Maps.

winona said 8:13AM on 6-04-2007

this is soo cool..when will it be available for download?

abdulla hachem said 10:28PM on 6-08-2007

if i want to know how could i activate street view - google please
can u advise me

rienagosp said 8:23AM on 6-11-2007

i love

Greg K Worrell said 2:24PM on 6-11-2007

is this ready for use? Also is it live to the point that you cab watch people coming and going from a location?

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