Google Map’s StreetView feature has finally arrived in the Twin Cities, reports Pioneer Press‘ Julio Ojeda-Zapata.
Like Twin Cities bloggers Ed Kohler and Aaron Landry, I’ve been messing around with the new view.
I’ve done the usual things with the new feature; looked at my work location, home, haunts old and new, and, of course, the sacred fields upon which I play touch football! 🙂
StreetView is cool and well implemented but a little clunky to use. With snow on the ground here in Minnesota, it’s a little weird crawling through the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the summer, when the photographs were taken. The whole dynamic creates a bit of a non sequitur type experience.
The grassy landscape brings up another issue for StreetViews: These days we increasingly expect our information to be very up to date, if not absolutely current. What is Google Maps’ plan for updating StreetView? How often can they reasonably re-photograph an entire metropolitan area? Or, even, presumably, the world? That seems like a Herculean task.
Finally, the marketer in me desperately wants some way to add content to the maps, like you can do with the My Maps feature. There’s gotta be a way to hook up people’s My Maps data with the StreetView maps so we can see the world’s annotations. Click a bubble on a photograph of a store for the hours and maybe even current sales or an embedded video.
The technology seems to already exist for this type of augmented reality marketing, it’s just a matter of hooking the pieces together.
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