Googlified

The Google LatLong Blog announced several updates to the images of Manhanttan used in Google Street View. Among the updates, I find their new move to blur out people’s faces to be quite interesting.

We’re also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making — working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery.

They are probably putting Neven Vision (an image recognition technology Google acquired two years ago) in use. Pascal from the GoogleWatchBlog said that the pictures are “a bit out of focus, even if there are no people,” and those new images are indeed a bit blurry when zoomed-in, despite Google claiming that they are now “sharper.” (I am probably comparing apple to orange, so please correct me if I am wrong.)

May 12, 2008 - a sad day for the whole community of Google Street View Stalkers (G.S.V.S) that will always be remembered.

Google Maps added a new feature recently that allows to you view driving direction on street level easier. This feature is currently available in city has Google Street View only. This is pretty similar to what has been added to the latest version of Google Earth.

Google Earth 4.3 was released two days ago on the 15th. The new version includes many updates and new features like Google Street View, new navigation controls, sunlight mode and a lot more. I guess I will let the pro from the GEarthBlog do the speaking.

The thing about Google Earth is that it doesn’t give me as much excitements now as it once did when it first launched in 2005.

In other news, Google announced SketchUp 3D Basecamp 2008 to gather SketchUp enthusiasts for “three days of SketchUp learning, sharing and fun” during June 11th to the 13th. Also, Earth Day 2008 is next Tuesday, on April 22nd.

Google Maps recently (like a week ago) added a little arrow next to the text input that will show up to 5 most recent saved location when clicked. This gives users easier access to their recent saved locations but I would rather have it to show the most used ones.

[thanks to Natasha R.]

Google Maps today added 13 more cities and a national park to Street View. The new cities are Albuquerque, Anchorage, Austin, Cleveland, Fairbanks, Little Rock, Madison, Nashville, Rockford, Richmond, Spokane, St. Petersburg, Tampa, and the Yosemite National Park. The Google LatLong Blog noted that they have expanded coverage in 6 of their existing cities.

Also, the Google Maps API now has support for Street View. I am sensing a series of games coming out soon based on the Street View API, but I would hate to wait 5 minutes for the Street View images to load (for the game). [ loading scene ... 5% - approx. 2 hrs left ]

Google Transit is now available for residents and visitors of Perth, the fourth largest city in Australia. Google Transit also made its way to France, in Maubeuge, a town with a little over 30,000 residents, and Bia?ystok, the largest city in northeastern Poland.

You probably recognize the “Alien Family” from earlier Google logos.

It’s better than some Hollywood productions I must say. Definitely looking forward to more of these. :)

[via Google Maps Mania]

Google Maps had already replaced the yellow person icon in Google Street View with a leprechain to celebrate the St. Patrick’s Day.

In Irish mythology, a leprechaun is a type of male faerie said to inhabit the island of Ireland. [...] They usually take the form of old men who enjoy partaking in mischief. Their trade is that of a cobbler or shoemaker. [Wikipedia]

So do I need to wear green tomorrow (in order to avoid the possibility of getting pinched) even though the holiday has been observed on the 15th?

[via Google Maps Mania]

Last year, the Sky feature was added to Google Earth, and now, like Google Maps, the Sky data are now accessible via a web browser, with the launch of Google Sky.

You can search for planets, listen to Earth & Sky podcasts, watch some beautiful Hubble telescope images, or explore historical maps of the sky from the comfort of your browser. [Official Google Blog]

The site is really slow on this end of the tube (or bad programming?) and a lot of images aren’t loading. I wonder if this is a response to Microsoft’s announcement of the WorldWide Telescope [pic].

The Google Enterprise Blog announced today that they launched a “new” product,

We’re excited to announce a new product designed specifically for businesses who want to put Google Maps on their website: Google Maps API Premier.

However, the “new” product turns out to be the very same product that they launched one and a half years ago, with the name “Google Maps for Enterprise“.

110% not cool.

The Google Maps team today released a new API today that doesn’t require scripting. Basically you just have to create a parameterized URL according to the documentation, (or simply copy & paste the URL you created using the wizard), then copy & paste the URL in a HTML <img> tag and off you go. :)

There’s a query limit of “1000 unique image requests per user per day” and a size limit of 512×512 pixels. I created something similar like over a year ago that doesn’t have the query limit (I think) and the size limit is 2000*2000 pixels - about 15x of the official one, but the downside is it doesn’t offer all those fancy markers.

I don’t think it will be that hard to overcome the official limits, by either using CSS or server-side (or whatever you think is a better approach) to combine several images together.

Google recently created a My Maps application that matches Wikipedia articles with places on Google Maps, and shows summary of the Wikipedia in Google Maps. It seems like Google just pulling data out from Wikipedia (or maybe used one of Wikipedia’s database dumps). Similar wiki-mapping services such as Wikimapia and Placeopedia has been around for quite bit of time, but they are more like manually add/edit (the locations & info).