The guys over at Google have come up with yet another amazing hack: Google Maps, incredible in its own right, can now do satellite images, and at an amazingly high resolution too.
Of course, as with any new search technology, my first search was for myself–in this case, for my house–and sure enough, there it is, plain as day. You can even see my car parked in the driveway–very cool but a bit scary too.
For obvious reasons, I’m not including a link to that image here, but here’s Progeny (the building at center, just south of the trees).
Deb and I spent a good hour poking in various addresses and looking down from the bird’s eye view. In addition to the obvious places, such as the World Trade Center and the White House (the Washington Monument is just south of the White House, with the National Mall extending to the west and east, the Lincoln Memorial at the far west end of the Mall, the Capitol at the east, and the Pentagon just off the screen to the southwest across the Potomac River), we had a look at our old house in Tucson. Sure enough, they built a fire station across the road in the back, just like our former neighbors complained about last time we saw them.
Related link: Google Sightseeing. “Why bother seeing the world for real?”
It can’t be an accident that just the capital building and a couple buildings next to it are low resolution. Though what secrets their roofs have to keep I cannot imagine.
Wake up google. There’s a whole world *NOT* in the US of A.
maps.google.com? howsabout “usa-maps.google.com”
yes, there is a world outside of the usa. yet as an american based company, i dont find it unusual that they start mapping the usa first. it actually has some good maps of canada too (though i doubt they have satalite images of it yet). now if it was maps.google.fr and it didnt have maps of france i would find it odd, or maps.google.co.uk and didnt have maps of the uk, then yeah, you can complain.
perhaps if they called it partialnorthamericamaps.google.com would make people happy? nah, stick with maps.google.com and keep making the google experience better on the whole :)