Google Maps adds street view for 13 cities + 1 national park
Google Maps has a really cool feature if you don't already know about it. It's called Street View and puts you at eye level and lets you explore the streets of supported cities. There are only a handful of them still, but it's great to see they are continuing to add cities at a brisk pace. Today, they announced the addition of these thirteen cities:
- Albuquerque, NM
- Anchorage, AK
- Austin, TX
- Cleveland, OH
- Fairbanks, AK
- Little Rock, AR
- Madison, WI
- Nashville, TN
- Rockford, IL
- Richmond, VA
- Spokane, WA
- St. Petersburg, FL
- Tampa, FL
As an extra bonus, they slipped in Yosemite National Park in California too.
I've been pondering how this street view feature is actually going to scale though. Google Maps is one thing -- they only have to snap a series of pictures from space to get updated content -- but street view requires someone to drive up and down every street in all the supported cities to get fresh content. I wonder what the plan is?
Another announcement made today by the Google Maps team is the inclusion of Street View data in the Google Maps API. Very cool, and surely it won't be long before we start seeing some interesting mashups like we did with the original Google Maps data.