My friend Christina called to say she had moved in with her beau and to give me her current address. Immediately, I went online and did a "drive by" which is, I went to googlemaps and typed in her address. Thanks to an application called Streetview, I was able to not only see what her new digs looked like, but that her neighbor had a dented fender, and how the walk might be to the park as I cruised about. While it's not in actual time, it was pretty amazing technology to see what she might see.
There's been all kinds of accidental voyuerism with Google's Streetview, including seeing some poor woman's thong as she gets into her truck and a deer which was supposedly run over by the Streetview cameraman's car. A group of citizens in Pittsburgh collaborated with Google to show something a bit more interesting along Sampsonia Street including a man dressed in a giant blue bird costume, a woman escaping out of a window with bed sheets, and a full marching band.
Fast on Google's big brother behavior is Microsoft's version of Google called Bing. It's offers a similar to Googlemaps in that you are able to access images via their "Bird's Eye View". It's different in that the bird's eye view is very 3-dimensional looking. You're able to swing around and actually see from four different views as if you were magically circling overhead.
I'll illustrate the comparison with one of Portlanders favorite "sculptures" in town, the giant Paul Buyan in the quaint Kenton neighborhood so you can see what I'm saying. First is Google's StreetvIew:
vs. Bing.com's Bird's Eye View:
Again, Bing's version is not in real time - as in, they took the picture once and that's it. I appreciate this technology and it's pretty cool to see how big my friend's back yard is across the country since I can't be there in person. Though I can't help but be slightly paranoid about it all.
