Google Maps released their Street View service in London yesterday. This allows you to zoom in to ground level and view an area as if you were driving down the street. Anyone who happened to be in the area when the Street View van took these pictures is now immortalized on camera.
Of course I looked at my own place first. I’m not visible, but you can see a gargoyle in my window as a little white blob. (No, I’m not telling you where I live.)
Then I went to the sketchy part of town to look for weird people. I found this half-naked confused rollerblader:
Then, Katrina Clarke, on Twitter, posted this capture from right across the street:
Aww, just two people holding hands. But let’s go back down the street (and back in time) to further explore their relationship:
Hmm, they weren’t holding hands a second ago.
Wait, is that a little white baggy in his hand?
And a few seconds after the hand holding, is he stuffing something into his pocket?
Ok so it’s not unambiguous evidence of a drug deal caught on camera, but given the sequence of events and the generally drugginess of the area, it’s more than possible.
Which is ironic, when you shift the view of that last picture just a bit to the left:
Of course, Microsoft couldn’t be left out of all this fun. So in their latest attempt to play catchup with Google, they upgraded their Bing Maps service. They have obviously put a lot of work into making it nearly identical to Google Maps, which confused me, since you know, Google Maps already exists.
Then I saw THIS.
I heard of photosynth a long time ago — it makes three dimensional renderings of an area out of still pictures tagged with a location (making leaving the house even more pointless) — but I never imagined it could be used for such important applications as viewing the landmark of … a jackalope in some dude’s basement?
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See also:
Phronk.com 
Comments
9 responses to “Fun With Maps”
Seriously? Not even a topless picture of you? You should totally start doing random weird shit in the streets and see if you can make it onto Google Street View.Which is the creepiest thing to hit the internets since…the peepgina.
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Glad to see it's business as usual in my neighbourhood while I'm up here on campus at work…
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Hahahaha, me and my coworker just had a discussion about this. Did't some guy get fired cuz he was found via Google Maps passed out on his front lawn? Awesome.
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Umm now this is just down right creepy. Why is Google going all Big Brother on us?
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1) Searching to find the peepgina.2) There's an awesome collection of totally wacky Google StreetView pics at: http://googlestreetviews.com/ click one of the various collections.3) cough ImdoingworkforBingMapsrightnow cough
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Hmmm… that lady needs a lot bigger peeps or a lot more peeps to cover up her bits and crannies.
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The drug deal is hilarious. I wonder if they know.
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Oh crap, why did I even google peepgina?
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