Google Maps adds street view, multi-mashups

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 30 May 2007 03:27

Your IT - Home IT

Google Maps has begun offering Street View - 360-degree, navigable photographic views of selected locations - and is trialing an API that allows multiple mashups to be displayed simultaneously.

"With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans," company officials said.

Initial coverage is of San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver, with "many more city rollout announcements... in the near future," according to product manager Stephen Chau.

Apparently the new feature is not available to all users immediately, with reports from Canada and Australia that the Street View button described in Google's introductory video simply doesn't appear on the maps. New Google features sometimes take a while to propagate to all of the companies data centres.

That video shows that the level of detail available in the photos is sufficient to read the parking restriction signs.

Google also announced Mapplets, an extension to Google Maps that product manager Thai Tran described as "embeddable mashups". Multiple Mapplets can be overlaid on a single map, for example to combine views of real estate listings, crime statistics and school ratings. Regular Google Maps features such as business search are also available.

The Mapplet API is currently only supported by a developer preview version of Google Maps. No indication was given of when the new feature will go live.

Google's Street View announcement was made on the same day as Microsoft launched its Live Search Maps Virtual Earth 3D coverage of New York City, with Austin, Texas, Cape Coral (Florida), Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Northampton (UK), Ottawa, Savannah (Georgia) and Tampa (Florida) slated for addition in the near future.

The key difference between the two services is that Google provides panoramic photographic images, while Microsoft delivers rendered 3D views of the buildings visible from a particular location. Also, Virtual Earth 3D only works with Internet Explorer for Windows, while Street View appears to be standards based for compatibility with all major browsers.