geo2web.com

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Google Maps Street View in France (and a tiny bit of Italy) has certainly brightened up my week. However the rest of Europe may have to wait some time for Street View to appear. Well they will if all the Street View car drivers are as keen to win a Darwin Award as the driver who took this image:

Now what possible reason could anyone have to close a mountain road at 2000 metres? I know - let’s drive on and see:

Ah avalanches! That looks fun let’s drive on.

What happened to the road?

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Posted by Mike Pegg, Product Marketing Manager

We’re pretty excited about all of these birthdays that have been happening lately. The Google Outreach program just celebrated its first birthday, and Google Maps Street View is happy to also be going one year strong.

We’re also pleased as punch to wish our pride and joy for geoweb developers everywhere, the Google Maps API, a happy third birthday. It was June 29th, 2005, but it seems like only yesterday that we were marvelling at what context the Gmaps Pedometer was giving us for our running routes or walk to work. Who can forget how many great real estate auctions we were finding with 2RealEstateAuctions? Since then the API has been helping businesses like Ace Hardware map its store locations, and Trulia plot houses for sale. Thanks, Google Maps API, for making all of these great mashups and tools possible! 

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Google Map’s Street View turns one today and in celebration Google have released street view for an amazing 37 new cities. The new cities include:

* MA: Springfield
* NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
* NJ: Newark
* VA: Virginia Beach
* NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
* SC: Columbia, Greenville
* GA: Atlanta
* FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
* AL: Huntsville
* MS: Jackson
* TN: Knoxville
* KY: Lexington, Louisville
* OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
* MI: Ann Arbor
* MO: St. Louis
* KS: Topeka
* NE: Lincoln
* OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
* NV: Reno
* CA: Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton

Here is an example of street view - I think this view might be in Reno:

Google have also updated imagery in many of the cities previously covered. This means that many of the images in the sites that are compiling street view galleries will have changed.

Check Out These Street View Galleries

• Streetviewr
• Street View Fun
• Street View Gallery
• Street Viewer Gallery

Via: Google LatLong: Street View turns 1, keeps on growing

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Posted by Jiajun Zhu, Software Engineer

To celebrate Street View’s one year birthday, I am very happy to announce we are bringing Street View to 37 (you heard me - 37!) new areas and we have expanded coverage in 15 of our existing areas. All in all, this effectively doubles our coverage. The new cities include:

• MA: Springfield
• NY: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse
• NJ: Newark
• VA: Virginia Beach
• NC: Charlotte, Winston-Salem
• SC: Columbia, Greenville
• GA: Atlanta
• FL: Boca Raton, Cape Coral, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach
• AL: Huntsville
• MS: Jackson
• TN: Knoxville
• KY: Lexington, Louisville
• OH: Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo
• MI: Ann Arbor
• MO: St. Louis
• KS: Topeka
• NE: Lincoln
• OK: Oklahoma City, Tulsa
• NV: Reno
• CA: Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton

Now you can stroll under the iconic Reno Arch:

Along with showing you some great metropolitan areas, I’m especially excited that we’re also bringing you 10 new parks and recreational areas:

• Everglades National Park (Florida)
• Florida Keys
• Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming)
• Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana)
• Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
• Joshua Tree National Park (California)
• Death Valley National Park (California)
• Lassen Volcanic National Park (California)
• Sequoia National Park (California)
• Lake Tahoe (California/Nevada)

Now you can see the boiling springs in Yellowstone National Park from a very safe distance:

And last but not least, Street View coverage has expanded in 15 of our current areas: Boise, Boston, Kansas City, Miami, Nashville, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Richmond, San Diego, San Francisco, Tampa, and Tucson.

We’ve also been spending the past year working very hard to improve Street View image quality. In this push, we removed some of our oldest images, so say goodbye to odd coloring and funky geometric artifacts. The new images have better color and more consistent lighting.

Let’s revisit San Francisco City Hall:

And the skyscrapers of Chicago:

Now you can look up in all our images. But what goes up must come down, so with this release you can also look down as well. The roof of our car and the ‘black hole’ really aren’t all that interesting — now when you pan down the car is magically gone and you can see straight to the ground in most of our images!

And finally, in the spirit of getting better with age, the face blurring technology we began testing in Manhattan has been deployed for all of our imagery. Remember that all these new Street View images are simultaneously available in Google Earth and through Google Maps API.

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Two more recent Google-related items:

• North Oaks, a rather xenophobic town in Minnesota — the streets are privately owned — has asked Google to remove it from Street View; Google has complied with the town’s request. Google’s gotten into trouble for its cameras trespassing on private property; the twist here is that the whole town is private property.
• The Google Maps API Blog has been replaced by the Google Geo Developers Blog, to reflect the company’s larger scope.

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