This morning on Google maps the streetview functionality went live allowing you to see your own road at street view level.
I think coverage is for much of the UK now, though I’ve only quickly tried Hoylake and West Kirby. Liverpool streetview was available some time ago.
It’s not a universally popular feature as some see it as an invasion of privacy. Personally, I think it’s great – how about you?
I’ve viewed our road of course, my mum and dad’s in Meols and various parts of Hoylake. If you live in a private road or up a very narrow lane or on Hilbre Island (!) Â then you might find that you can’t see anything. That’s because the images are taken from a special camera that sits on the roof of a car – so only streetview images are available for places where the cars were able to go. I have noticed that Carlton Lane (next to Carlton Terrace) isn’t included. Like me, you might have spotted the black google car around and about Hoylake last year?
Streetview is available for places around the world so you might find it useful to checkout potential holiday destinations (is the hotel you’re thinking of booking next door to a huge factory?) or seeing whereabouts your relatives new house is in Australia (we’ve done exactly that).
When viewing a map, the little man above the +/- slider is a gold colour when a streetview is available and you simply click and drag him to a part of the map that you want to look at. After a few goes you’ll soon get the hang of it and you’ll be spinning the view around and double-clicking the directional lines to move along a road.
Sometimes, you’ll be able to click and view photographs that other people have geo-tagged to a particular place. Take a look at this really old photo (opens in a new window) of Hoyle slipway for instance.
If you have a browse and find anything in Hoylake of interest do leave a comment and share it with me and your fellow readers.
I know that some people have found this to be controversial and an invasion of privacy but I think that it is fantastic and for free! Google has invested a lot of money into this project that will probably start the change of a lot of activities, as you said viewing holiday or work destinations seeing friends and families homes in another countries even the way that we will be buying houses in the future; the start of another leap in the use of technology integrated into everyday life, it’s getting harder to remember what life was like before the internet!!
WE got street veiw in Windsor, On. Canada, last fall. Themain complaint here is that the pictures where taken during our 115 day city workers stike last spring early summer. Apparently Google are going to reshot some of the less flattering sites, because of the stike. It seems to be across the large cities and towns in Ontario.
Did you know that Google streetview cars have little known and unexpected environmental benefits?
To prove this, in one shot, at the corner of Valentia and Kings Gap, as the Google camera car approaches my house, my beloved walnut tree is bare whilst a delivery van (yes I am ashamed to admit we do sometimes order groceries online) is unloaded.
In the next shot, the van is gone and the tree is in full leaf.
It clearly swallows supermarket vehicles and spits them out as leaves. It also turned my Citroen C8 into a far greener C3. Amazing.