Google Maps Gets Serious Upgrades with Street View and GPS

What's it look like in person?

Google has just this morning launched the Street View feature on Google Maps for most of the Bay Area, Las Vegas and New York. This announcement, made at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, is an incredible step forward, and from the few minutes I've spent playing with it, I can attest that the interface is smooth, intuitive and ridiculously cool.

This added functionality is a giant step forward for Google Maps' usefulness, and another glimpse into Google's 'master plan', where even the most minute pieces of information are cataloged and available online. Intangible and insignificant data like a neighborhood's 'feel' are now accessible through a browser. This takes the well-intentioned but poorly-executed goals of the late A9 and does them correctly.

I've just used Street View to check out my neighborhood, and I've just peered into my bathroom window to count the number of bottles on the windowsill. This level of data, as well as license plate numbers and images of pedestrians, will likely raise the ire of many with privacy concerns. But I'm just giddy about the technology. This kind of data certainly wasn't available before this morning...

Three bottles on the shelf.

Although not entirely within the scope of this greater blog, this announcement is relevant to my earlier treatise on the development of Google Maps into a more functional and location-based service.

Additionally, GPS-enabled Google Maps services have been announced for the Blackberry 8800.


Google Maps data has been available on mobile devices for awhile now, but accessing it has been a bit time-intensive, because the user has, until now, been required to determine their location and then enter it into the device. Now the obvious link between Google Maps and GPS data, provided by newer handsets, has been made. This is an expected but laudable development, and one step closer to the location-based social-networking solution I wrote about earlier. The open-API possibilities for further development of mobile applications is now staggering.

How Location-Based Social Networking Should Work

I'm excited about the possibilities of location-based mobile services. By this I mean software services that take advantage of a user's physical location (determined by a GPS transponder in the phone or by geographic information transmitted from the phone to the mobile network) to provide current and pertinent information such as traffic, public transit data, local attractions and restaurant reviews, localized shopping, and, most importantly, localized advertising, all determined by the user's location. The ability to offer an advertiser an audience qualified by their actual current location would be of huge value.

But today, in 2007, most LBS applications suck. They're difficult to use, and require so much time and attention to sign up, set up and use that most casual users will never try. It's a chicken-or-egg dilemma, but without a growing and active userbase, an LBS will never become successful.

The Killer LBS App
Start with Dodgeball. Functionally, it's a good place to begin. It's under the nurturing care of Google, so there are plenty of possibilities for piggybacking onto existing services that already have userbases, like Gmail.

Right now, users of Dodgeball are required to 'check in' actively via SMS. For some phones without GPS functionality, this is the only way it could work. But let's look further forward into the future, and go ahead and add passive GPS-derived check-ins. No more typing "@local bar name" and waiting for a flurry of SMS messages to go out to all of your friends. Instead, just go to the bar, and if you've turned your visibility on, then your friends will know where you are. If they need to be reminded, then just click "Announce My Location", and let your phone's GPS service take care of the rest.

The next step would be to build a mashup of Dodgeball, Google Maps and Gmail Chat, so that all of the big LBS benefits are delivered seamlessly through one solution.

Let's move on to the illustration of what this could look like, to facilitate the explanation:

From a mobile device (or from a desktop, but for the full benefit of the mobile aspect, let's assume we're using a mobile device), the user accesses a list of friends. Each friend's location is being tracked and reported by the GPS component of their mobile device, and their location is logged on the list. An illustration:

By selecting the Map view, the same list of friends can be viewed visually, with each contact's location displayed on a map, as shown here:
And finally, by selecting a friend individually, their profile can be accessed, a call or SMS can be initiated, or directions to their location can be requested: