If you live in Green Bay then there is a very good chance that a picture of your house is on the web. How is that possible, you ask? You may have heard of google's "street view" feature.
Once upon a time, web search engines put maps online (google, yahoo, mapquest, etc). Then they took it to the next level by including a layer for a satellite view taken from space - where you can look straight down on any location. How do you take
that to the next level? How about an actual street-level, 360 degree interactive photograph? Welcome to the future.
Google's map site has added a feature called "street view" where you can zoom to any address and see a photograph of the location in which you can pan around to the sides and behind. They started this in May 2007 with the major cities and are slowly expanding coverage. I read that their goal is to photograph every single public roadway
in the world and put it online. Now
that is a monumental task!
They've already got most major cities in the U.S. done, as well as areas of Japan, most of Australia (released on August 4th), parts of France (released in July), and a small bit of Canada. Here in Wisconsin, they started out with a big chunk from Grafton down thru Chicago and from the lakeshore over past Madison. Now, they have added Green Bay! Sorry, Appleton, you're not added yet.
Just go to the
google maps website and zoom to Green Bay. Click on "street view" and the streets that have photos will appear blue. Zoom to any address and click the icon, and you have a pop up window with the photo!
It doesn't say when the photos were taken, but I have a pretty good guess. Remember last year when the new Claude Allouez bridge in De Pere opened? October 1, 2007. They began work almost immediately afterward to dismantle the old bridge next to it. Well, if you zoom to Main Av. in De Pere you can see the photo is of the new bridge, and on the west side there is a crane just on the north side of the road. This is when they were working on the old bridge, and you can see that the trees are still mostly green. This means it had to be sometime during the first half of October 2007.
Google's street view is very cool. There's no set schedule when new cities' pictures are released...it happens every couple months or so. According to Wikipedia, "google cars" have been spotted taking pictures in Germany, Spain, Italy, UK, and major cities in Canada so that might be a clue what to look for next. 10 years ago, who would have imagined this would be possible?
