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Streetview
Mar. 20th, 2009 12:04 amOn the News today they were discussing Google having extended their Streetview service in Google Earth to cover some parts of the UK as well. I tried it out (incidentally, it didn't seem too intuitive how to turn on Streetview, I was expecting something in the menu bar near to the "Historical Imagery" button, but apparently it has to be turned on in the Layers menu, I had to look in Help to find that out), and it does seem to work well. The quality of the panoramic photographs is better than I was expecting and it does seem to have fairly comprehensive coverage in the areas it does cover - most streets in Cambridge seem to have imagery and although the new story made it sound like it was just cities being covered for now I was looking at my Granny's old house in Wellbank which is in the countryside a few miles outside of Dundee.
One of the people interviewed on the News was objecting that it didn't really have much practical use, and to some extent that is true, but I still found it quite interesting to go look round places I haven't been for many years and see how they had changed. Other than nosiness, I can think of other potential uses for it, it would have been very useful when I first moved to Cambridge and was trying to find a flat, since it would have allowed me to look at the neighbourhoods of the various flats to get some idea of what they were like without having to walk over half of Cambridge, and it would also allow potential renters/buyers to get a different photograph of the property than the one provided by the estate agents which might help cut down on the number of properties I would have tried to see round in person.
Google's privacy measures were also much discussed on the News, and I don't think either their face blurring (which seems to work OK most of the time but is often confused by people turning their head round) or their number plate blurring (which blurs most plates, as well as other random signs, but completely misses some for no readily apparent reason) work perfectly. I also managed to find someone I knew on it, even if I couldn't see his face (a hairdresser just next to my office whose shop has a large window and you can clearly see him through it on one Streetview photograph). That said, I think it's unlikely it would cause mant genuine privacy problems but it's not impossible there might be some.
One of the people interviewed on the News was objecting that it didn't really have much practical use, and to some extent that is true, but I still found it quite interesting to go look round places I haven't been for many years and see how they had changed. Other than nosiness, I can think of other potential uses for it, it would have been very useful when I first moved to Cambridge and was trying to find a flat, since it would have allowed me to look at the neighbourhoods of the various flats to get some idea of what they were like without having to walk over half of Cambridge, and it would also allow potential renters/buyers to get a different photograph of the property than the one provided by the estate agents which might help cut down on the number of properties I would have tried to see round in person.
Google's privacy measures were also much discussed on the News, and I don't think either their face blurring (which seems to work OK most of the time but is often confused by people turning their head round) or their number plate blurring (which blurs most plates, as well as other random signs, but completely misses some for no readily apparent reason) work perfectly. I also managed to find someone I knew on it, even if I couldn't see his face (a hairdresser just next to my office whose shop has a large window and you can clearly see him through it on one Streetview photograph). That said, I think it's unlikely it would cause mant genuine privacy problems but it's not impossible there might be some.
