A good time to announce I'm moving away from San Francisco and relocating to Singapore. I'll still be doing the same job with Linden Lab - I'll just be doing it from the other side of the world. Not sure how much time I'll get to work on this site (or my latest ideas for improvements) but I will get back to it eventually. Please keep sending in interesting and funny Street Views.
July 28th 2008
Woot! We surpassed 3000 Street Views.
July 16th 2008
Back from my Rome, Alamfi Coast, Istanbul vacation now my update script is running now. I see that the Tour De France route now has some limited suport. I changed my code to add the new cities/way points.
June 26th 2008
Updates will be a little sparse for the next couple of weeks. Something very special coming though.
June 16th 2008
This photo set shows a Google Vehicle getting some unwanted attention from the fuzz.
June 11th 2008
The updates from yesterday appear to have broken a lot of the captured Street Views in two ways. One is annoying and easy to fix. The other is annoying and hard to fix. Firstly, some of the lat/long coordinates don't have a panorama associated with them anymore and so there is no Street View for that location (Odd as I thought the API used 'closest' but I need to look again). I have a script that will find those and discard them - around 200 so far - shame, but there you go. The other problem is that the new captures have replaced some of the older, classic views. That's harder to detect because everything works - it just doesn't make sense. That naked man walking down the high street is just a plain old boring high street now. I think I can find them all by capturing a thumbnail of each view like I do for the site and comparing the old and the new. If they're radically different, something changed. I wish there was a way to 'lock' the revision of the image for each view. Google! store your images in SVN or Mercurial and give us revision control :)
June 10th 2008
Google announced a huge updated today, supposedly for their first birthday which I'm sure was last week. In any case, there are 37 new areas and updates to 15 existing ones. I updated all my scripts and new cities will appear in the location list as views get added. In addition, the face-blurring technology has been deployed to all areas and you can now look down "through" the Google capture vehicle. Does this mean they have a camera underneath too?
June 2nd 2008
Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday dear Streetviewr. Happy birthday to me. Just a smidge over a year since this site started. Thanks for all submissions, amusing stories and messages of support.
May 21st 2008
Public service warning: When using a mandoline to slice vegetables, remember to use the hand protector. If you don't, you might end up with a trip to the ER, 5 stitches, a tetanus jab and a kitchen that looks like a slaughterhouse. Stitches come out Monday...
May 15th 2008
At some point in the future, Google is going to switch on Street View for cities in other parts of the world - Australia and Canada have been mentioned as possible candidates for example. I've been monitoring the URLs for the Web services that Street View uses to convert latitude and longitude into IDs that identify which panorama to display. - as soon as they change from (essentially) empty to "something" we'll know that these cities are about to go live. Here they are for Sydney, Toronto, London, and Paris
May 13th 2008
Whilst the face blurring technology is clever, it might be interesting to remove the people altogether (not that this would help sites like this one). I wonder if there is a way they could take multiple passes of the same street and replace the parts of the shot with people in it with similar views from a people-less version. They might have to do it multiple times and it might be very tricky in busy areas like Manhatten but it sounds like it's possible.
May 12th 2008
Google updated the coverage for the Manhattan area. The images are now higher resolution (i.e. clearer) and now support a full 3 degrees of freedom like more recent cities so you can look upward too. Not all parts of all the images are clearer though - they're also trying out a face-blurring technology and it actually works pretty well but there are some issues :)
April 15th 2008
The latest version of Google Earth (4.3) has an option to display Street Views. It feels a bit clumsy to me when you "enter" a Street View but once you're there it's quite nice. Still needs to be live video instead of out-of-date images though :)
April 14th 2008
B
Updates have been spotty recently as I've been in UK for a week working from my folks' place and having a birthday. I'm in the (spectacular) London Heathrow Virgin lounge waiting for my flight back to San Francisco and their WiFi is (surprisingly) fast enough for me to update the site.
April 3rd 2008
As well as the usual update, I added some links to images of some work with uBrowser and Street View work I've been thinking about. Take a look at the images of a cube, a flag and a ball.
April 1st 2008
I resisted the temptation to add something for April Fool's day. You won't find any Street Viewing, Rick-rolling, Mars colonizing links here.
March 27th 2008
Busy day for Street View developers as well as fans. Today, Google also blogged about the Google Maps API updates that support Street View.
It's been available for a couple of weeks but it's good to see it finally get a mention on the blog along with a neat sample gallery.
March 27th 2008
Today Google added 13 new metropolitan areas (including a national park) to the ever growing list of Street View supported locations. They also expanded coverage for 6 of the existing cities. The complete list is now:
Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Houston, Los Angeles, Orlando
San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Tucson
I usually go to Yosemite for my birthday which is coming up soon and Google goes ahead and launches Street View for Yosemite. Another coincidence? I don't think so.. :)
March 17th 2008
Happy St. Patrick's Day. As usual, Google are getting into the 'spirit' of things and have customized Street View a little. For example, here is St. Patrick about to go in for a pint of his favorite tipple. For posterity (and post-St. Patrick's Day), here is an image of the same thing, If you want to look at the PNG icons themselves, try here or here. There is a series of 16 for each - one for every 22.5 degrees of rotation. I wasn't able to find the Berkeley Hippie or the Halloween witch - maybe they get deleted after the event..
March 16th 2008
Rob at Map Channels created a very neat mashup called Dual Maps that also uses the unannounced Google Maps Street View API. It's an embeddable control that lets you display two maps side-by-side for a single location. Works really well so go take a look.
March 12th 2008
The ever-vigilant Kier over at Virtual Tourism spotted something interesting today.. Yes, Google haven't released it officially yet but there is a Google API now for Street View. I guess that's why my site was broken today - they updated their Flash viewer as part of the un-release perhaps. Can't wait to see what they've exposed..
March 12th 2008
The joys of life on the bleeding edge.. I see Google changed the version number / filename of their Flash Street Viewer and invalidated the old one - hence things were a bit broken today. I can get the version number from the Web service that also gives me the pano-id - perhaps I should use that... or maybe there is another way...
February 15th 2008
I've been wondering recently how many miles of Street View coverage there is. Shouldn't be hard to pick a spot in each region and 'follow' the route everywhere. Each location has the ID of the one next to it. Knowing how many steps there are and approximately how big each step is will tell us how many miles there are. Maybe. Or, it is Friday and I could just go out drinking..
February 13th 2008
We broke the "2,000 views collected mark" this evening - that's pretty amazing but on the other hand; are there really only 2,000 interesting things to see in the hundreds (thousands) of miles of coverage Street View has now? Maybe the world isn't quite as interesting as we thought...
February 12th 2008
I added some great Street Views from Keir's wonderful Virtual Tourism site. It's easily the best site of its kind out there - go check it out
February 12th 2008
I added the new cities and their latitudes/longitudes to my processor and updated the site. I also made the index/start/home/whatevah page this one - just to keep you up to date :) Go here for the Street Views
February 12th 2008
Now that more cities are being added, it's a little harder to tell which one a Street View belongs to. For what it's worth, this is a list of the 30 "official" cities according to Google: Denver, LasVegas, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Houston, Los Angeles, Orlando, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Tucson, Boston, Providence, Indianapolis, Detroit, Minneapolis, Dallas, Juneau, Boise, Salt Lake, San Antonio, Kansas City, Raleigh, Albany, Manchester, Milwaukee - full list here
February 12th 2008
6 new cities added - Juneau, Alaska; Boise, Idaho; Salt Lake City, Utah; San Antonio, Texas; Raleigh/Durham/Cary, North Carolina; Manchester, New Hampshire - look here for a list of Street Views by city
January 13th 2008
Bit of a break in updating - I was in Asia for a funeral :( - normal service to resume now
December 17th 2007
Mashable lists the site as one of the Top 7 Coolest Web Apps of 2007 - thanks so much guys - is the color scheme really that hideous though? Ok, don't answer that :)
December 11th 2007
Google adds 8 new cities to Street View - Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Fort Worth, Boston, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Providence. So a new version of Streetviewr is launched and Google releases more cities - coincidence? I don't think so.. :)
December 9th 2007
New version of Streetviewr is launched.
December 5th 2007
I decide to try a new kind of site - this is going to be more than a facelift
December 1st 2007
Works starts on the Streetviewr facelift and freshen-up
September 16th 2007
Site updates gets put on hold while Streetviewr decide how to make the site better
August 8th 2007
Streetviewr gets interviewed by the LA Times
June 7th 2007
Streetviewr gets interviewed by CNN
June 1st 2007
Google launches Street View and a day later, Streetviewr is born
