The June 2nd imagery update for Google Earth is now available in Google Maps, including most of England as well as various other places around the world.
Google Maps now has all of the new imagery from Google Earth
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Stephen Chau, product manager for Google Maps, addresses Street View privacy issues
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Freakonomics has an interview with Stephen Chau, the product manager for Google Maps. Their questions all address the new Street View feature of Map. In the interview, Chau addresses some of the privacy concerns that have been raised.
Some snippets:
- “At Google we take privacy very seriously. Street View only features imagery taken on public property and is not in real time. This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”
- ” …we respect the fact that people may not want imagery they feel is objectionable featured on the service. We provide easily accessible tools for flagging inappropriate or sensitive imagery for review and removal.”
- “We routinely review takedown requests and act quickly to remove objectionable imagery. “
Nothing too groundbreaking in there, but it’s a good read. You can read the full interview here
.
Factory in Malaysia is offering ad space on its roof
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, a Malaysian company that owns a large factory, is offering up ad space that would be viewable in all of the various mapping systems (once the area gets updated again). They’ll be using a company in California, RoofAds, to do the installation.
I imagine that we’ll be seeing quite a bit of this kind of thing as time goes on. In this case, however, there are a few other issues to consider that were raised in an article by the Natural Search Blog:
- This is apparently the factory in Google Maps – completely obscured by smoke/clouds. If it’s a cloud, odds are pretty good that it won’t be there next time. However, if it’s smoke from the factory then that would likely be there every time.
- There is a good deal of child labor that occurs in Malaysia. You’d want to make sure that this isn’t happening at the factory where your ad would be placed.
- The ad space will go up in November. Why then? I can’t imagine they know when any new satellite photos will be taken. I guess that’s just when they’ll put up the ad, and then it’ll show in GE, GM, VE, etc — eventually.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, as well as to see how many other companies try the same thing in future months.
JetBlue providing Google Maps in seatback TVs
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The Google Lat Long Blog just announced
that JetBlue is now providing fliers with Google Maps in their “signature seatback TVs”. On top of that, they’re asking customers to take pictures out the window during their flight, note the location with Google Maps, then send the pictures in. The top 10 photographers will win roundtrip tickets for two to anywhere that JetBlue flies.
Having recently been on a Delta flight with a seatback TV map, I can see how cool this could be. The Delta map was neat, but it was very static. It would show the map in a full-US view, then in a zoom view, then some statistics, then more statistics, then back to the full-US view, etc. Being able to control the map would have been very cool.
I’ve never used JetBlue, but I continue to hear good things about them. Maybe I’ll have to try them for my next trip.
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Maybe Google Earth really IS aiding terrorists
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This story might end up getting blown way out of proportion…
The Smoking Gun is reporting that one of the men arrested in the recent JFK airport terror plot had been using Google Earth to get details on the facility. Apparently the terrorists used Google Earth to share information about various physical aspects of the airport, including the distance from the street to the fuel tanks.
Depending how the press decides to run with this story, Google may face some serious heat. Of course, if Google Earth (and Maps) didn’t exist, there’s hundreds of other places where terrorists can get this data. It’ll be interesting to see how this gets portrayed in the coming days.
Some other tidbits about Google Maps from last week.
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Mike Pegg at Google Maps Mania just posted a short summary of new features
in the Google Maps API that were revealed at the Google Developer Day last week. There are a number of items in there, but the main one I missed was the ability to add live traffic data to your API map. It’s very simple to do, so kudos to Google for that.
It’s worth reading the full article on his site
when you get a chance.
Why did Google create Street View?
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The more I think about it, the more I question why Google spent so much time and money implementing “Street View”. Sure, it’s neat — but isn’t it just a temporary (and unnecessary) step?
With the advancements in 3D buildings in Google Earth (and Virtual Earth, for that matter), making your own “Street View” of any street anywhere is getting easier. For example, look at the comparison shot below in Denver:
Street View looks a bit better if you zoom in tight, but Google Earth is very close. It simply seems to me that Google would be better served improving their 3D models rather than going off on this temporary side project.
Of course, there are three good reasons why they might have decided to make Street View, even with the objections I have.
1 – Good press.
It’s not a big news story to say “the 3D models in Denver are now a little bit sharper than they were before”, but Street View has generated a ton of news hype (and therefore traffic and revenue).
2 – It’s in a browser. Google Earth is a standalone client and not as easily accessible for everyone. Of course, maybe Google Earth will end up in a browser some day and that will be an irrelevant point. However, Google hasn’t indicated that at all so it might never happen.
3- Maybe they’ll be using the Street View data to map onto 3D buildings, and this is just a temporary interface into it.
What do you think? Is Street View just a temporary stop on the way to something else? Or is it the way of the future?
The state of Google Maps
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It’s been quite a week for Google Maps. Where 2.0 and the Google Developer Day last week brought a flurry of new announcements. I’ll run through them all for you:
Driving directions for the API
You can now use driving directions on your API maps. Not only can you do full directions, but you can capture each step and output it any way that you want, or you can include waypoints in there. It’s quite powerful.
Google Mapplets
As Google puts it, it allows you to create a “mashup of mashups”. Right now it’s kind of tucked away on their site, but you can find it here. I liken it very much to the layers feature of Google Earth. You can take seemingly unrelated content and layer it on top of one another to create a more useful map. At the Developer Day they showed examples of real estate info, mixed with schools, mixed with crime data, mixed with local transit. Having the other data available made the real estate info more useful.
As this feature gains popularity it will also become much more useful.
Street View
You’ve undoubtedly heard about this already. Google just released “Street Views” for Google Maps. It’s quite slick, allowing you to see tons of street-level imagery, but it’s so far only available in five cities (San Francisco, New York City, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami). Mike Pegg at Google Maps Mania has a nice write-up about it.
AdSense Integration
Google announced this at Developer Day, but it’s still about a month away. With just a couple extra lines of JavaScript, Maps mash-ups will be able to contain AdSense placemarks. They’ll show up on the map automatically (such as the location of nearby hotels) and the developer will get paid if a user clicks through for more info — just like a normal AdSense ad. The integration looks quite slick, so it’ll be interesting to see how this works once it’s released.
KML support
Google has been ramping up their support for KML files in maps, and that’ll be increasing a few weeks. Right now, the maps will blow up if you give it more than a few hundred placemarks in a KML. However, within “a couple weeks” you’ll be able to load massive numbers of files and Google will deal with it. They’ll show the “most relevant” items when zoomed out, then include more and more as users zoom in. It’s similar to how most mash-ups work now, but it’ll make the development of those mash-ups much easier, assuming the relevancy is worked out well.
There’s much to be excited about with Google Maps. If I missed anything, please let me know.
The state of Virtual Earth
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I thought I’d start things out on here by talking about some recent insights and improvements to each of the three main topics on this blog – Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, Google Maps and Google Earth.
We’ll start with Virtual Earth. If you haven’t used it in a few months, you need to go check it out again. It is progressing at an amazing rate of speed. Within just the last few weeks we’ve seen a new version be released (v5) as well as a TON of new data.
Version 5 offers some cool stuff. The most interesting to me is the info box – the description that pops up when you click an item. You can now put any HTML in there that you want, which means forms, videos, photos, etc can all be seen in there. This is also the case with Google Maps, but not with Google Earth where you are very limited on what you can put in there.
Their latest data update was also quite impressive. According to their developer blog, they’ve added 11.5 terabytes of data! This includes new high-res standard data, new bird’s eye data and a bunch of new cities in 3D. It’s quite impressive.
All of that being said, they’re still way behind in a few areas. I attended their “birds of a feather” session at Where 2.0 this week and came out with two very bizarre things.
First, they were showing off some new polygon-related features and how to code them. It looked great, but I didn’t see how to assign altitude to a point so you can have it float in the air or be a side of a cube or whatever. When I asked how it was done, they pretty much just grumbed and shook their heads. I assume it’s coming soon, but right now polygons are flat on the ground.
Next was when they were showing off image overlays. They showed an image overlay on the ground and then tilted down so we could see how it followed the flow the terrain. There was an audible gasp in the room from being people so impressed. My reaction was WTF? Google Earth has been doing this for almost two years now. It’s nice that VE does it now too, but why was it such a big deal? I still haven’t figured that one out.
One other nice thing they showed off was how you can “rubberize” image overlays – stretch and skew them to fix whatever area you want. This is sorely lacking from Google Earth and it was well-implemented. On the flip side, it’s a pain in the butt to add any image overlay, whereas Google Earth makes it simple.
All in all, Virtual Earth is something to keep an eye on. I’m very pleased they’re working so hard on this, as it’ll only serve to push Google even harder. Also, the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator is a must-have for VE, as Frank Taylor explains here. It’s a must-have for Google Earth as well, but GE tends to have a bit better mouse control. The mouse control in VE is quite awful, but the SpaceNavigator makes it much
better.
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