Google Street View Appreciation Post
Hey! Take a breather from our awesome site and teleport randomly throughout the globe Street View-style on mapcrunch.com. Maybe put it on slideshow mode and adjust the delay.
Even though you aren’t actually heading to any of the places it may bring you, so knowing what these places look like won’t give you much practical advantage in your navigational efforts which at the moment you don’t even have, it just may make you realize and better appreciate the scale of this project, this mission of greatness, and how that when mankind does embark on something so magnificent, of course you’re bound to make a few mistakes along the way and people will break your balls excessively for it but damnit, the greater good isn’t wasting time protesting and egging Street View cars, rather they are getting to their destinations more effectively thanks to the hard work of these Google folks with their fancy cameras and wifi receivers and so the greater good doesn’t have time to counter-protest those loudmouth Brits who are, let’s face it, just beating up on Google because they want to return fire for how we didn’t let their precious BP off the hook so easily for ruining livelihoods of a lot our citizens, fouling beaches and killing some birds as if that’s anywhere near the same level as collecting arguably a little too much data but not using it in any way other than hanging onto it so no one calls them out for destroying evidence because a lot of them are long on BP in their pensions.
So please, do enjoy this fascinating site for a good two minutes or so and then you may find it easier to stop talking trash about Google – if only as a favor to me. Hey, you might learn a little geography along the way.
Doug Simmons
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About The Author
Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
So, can you feel the veins, Doug?
Doug, pretty pictures apart, you have obviously not seen the awsome levels of functionality and usefulness achieved by using essentially the same idea and similar tools, something that can actually help people reach the correct place and make informed decisions based on information accessible from something as ubiquitous as a smartphone. Well, try this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-_T949uSwU&feature=player_embedded
The culprits are, you wouldn’t have guessed it, Microsoft Research Labs, your favourite flogging horse. LOL…. While I don’t expect this to cure your google-fixation, but hopefully it might help you think of a “Life Beyond Googleplex Walls”. 🙂
For 98% of would-otherwise-be-Street View users the sizzle in that wrapped around Google’s steak, which came well before the Microsoft sizzle was applied, is extraneous. All that’s good for, mostly, is to say, though in other language, “Hey everybody look at the latest thing we ’embraced and extended’ from the other guys! Here’s the youtube link of our new fancy thing hosted on their OWN SERVERS which we did not because we couldn’t come up with a better Youtube /yet/ but for the irony! Google ‘do know evil’? How about instead of focusing on doing no evil you wake the heck up and improve your products before we do it for you, suckers! Lol, right everybody?!”
Whoop dee doo. Did you know those street view cars are actually using wifi signal strengths somehow to x-ray the inside of buildings, bat style? Maybe not the brightest thing to talk about during another privacy scandal but still, that’s some out of the box thinking right there.
Just stumbled upon this street view best-of site: http://streetviewfunny.com
That’s kind of an inevitable discovery argument which I didn’t concede, but riddle me this, why does MSNBC (and NBC and pretty much everyone else) use Google Earth all the time when Microsoft has an 18% piece of the company and a competing product? What happened to “eating your own dogfood” especially if your dogfood is better? Is it better?
Glad that you accept that MS has done it better and Google just has first mover advantage in this case. I knew you’d see reason where it exists 😉
Well, you talk of Street View and I mentioned Street Slide which is a similar but better product by another company and then all the arguments you put forth are about who did what first, who does not have a video streaming service and who does not bully corporates under their influence to use their other services. In my language that translates as ‘conceeding’. In English it means “Hey pard, I accept that Street Slide is way better than whatever Google could do in years of snooping around with its high power wifi signal equipped Sreet View cars, but what the heck, since I cannot be seen conceeding to M$ on my own blog, so let me divert the attention to other things where I can argue with a semblance of strength and close out with a moral victory.”
Just sayin’…..