After much anticipation, Google Street View for Google Maps has come to Canada. Google likes to think of Street View as being the last zoom layer on the map – when you’ve zoomed all the way in you find yourself virtually standing on the street. So far, Street View has been rolled out for Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax.

Such a feature can help promote your business. For instance, if people looking for directions want to take a look at your building’s facade, they can. I’d like to see how Vancouver Realtors (like Kye and Ian) take advantage of this for promoting listings.

As traditional news media is evolves, journalists can link to the site of a story on Google Street view, showing where an event occurred. I like this idea as it would provide an experiential element to the news.

One of the biggest concerns with Street View is privacy. While  Street View contains imagery that is no different from what you might see driving or walking down the street, Google has developed  face and license plate blurring technology that is applied to all Street View images, and anyone can request the removal of an image.

I was caught by Street View a couple of times canvassing during the B.C. Provincial election:

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

The man driving the Google Car with the camera on top was very nice. He even stopped to allow me to take a Twitpic of him and would wave to enthusiastic pedestrians every time he passed.

What do you think?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites