Google Debuts Street View and Mapplets

Today at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference Google unveiled two new map features. An O'Reilly blogger describes Street View, which uses 360-degree street-level video from Immersive Media to enable neighborhood walk-throughs in (for now) a few selected areas. The other new feature is Mapplets, which let you embed Google Maps mashups in any Web page. Much more coverage is linked from TechMeme.

Wow, it's a great century to be a stalker

[Travoltus]

This stuff makes scoping out someone's house soooo much easier.

Re:Uh Oh

[QuantumG]

Although I completely agree with you on the matter of "privacy", I do believe there is a social norm which dictates that it is rude to photograph someone without their permission. That's the problem we have with paparazzi, and those annoying "current affairs" shows that go around with their cameras trying to get people on tape telling them to fuck off, as if it somehow exposes their guilt. These people get punched in the face not because of some expectation of privacy, but because they are violating a social norm. Especially when they continue filming after they have been told to stop. If you want a dose of this yourself, go down to the beach and take some pictures.. you'll be quickly approached by men responding to their girlfriend's squeels of "he's taking our picture!" It's just not acceptable behaviour.

Re:Microsoft Couldnt Do This In a Million Years

[Osty]

Interesting, it didn't work for me with Firefox 2.0. But I looked at the useragent, and apparently FF 2.0 uses a useragent like BonEcho/2.0.0.1, instead of Firefox/2.0.0.1. When I changed it to Firefox (like it was in previous releases) it worked fine. With BonEcho it just showed a small, boring looking map. Same thing with Opera. I wonder why the Mozilla folks changed the useragent in 2.0.

I don't believe you're actually using Firefox 2.0. Or rather, you're using a very old alpha release (Bon Echo [mozilla.org] was the Firefox2 codename in development). Upgrade your browser :).

That said, this seems typical for Microsoft. They "get" that they need to support Firefox and other non-IE browsers, but they do so in the crappiest of ways -- using UA string detection. UA detection is obvious and "easy". It basically creates a "fail by default" model, where if you're not doing exactly what is expected then it just refuses to work. This is easier to build and test than a proper object detection mechanism which may have strange edge cases when the objects you need are supported in a browser but don't quite act the same way. It's possible to do, but it's a lot of work to get right and I bet that the Windows Live guys decided that just getting it working was more important than getting it right. If you use your BonEcho UA on other Live properties (Spaces, live.com, Expo, QnA, etc), they'll probably fail in a similar fashion.

I've fought that fight several times myself, and each time I end up losing because doing the right thing is hard and there's just no time to do it and all of the other high-priority work items. The only way to ever win that argument is to change priorities -- if working on all possible browsers was priority #1, there'd always be time to do it right even if another feature or two had to wait for a later release. If working on IE6/7 is pri1, working on Firefox (but not other Gecko-based browsers, like Seamonkey, Galleon, or K-meleon, even though if you did the right thing they'd just work) is pri2, and working on anything else is pri3, guess what'll happen? Yep, a quick regex against the UA for "Firefox", and if you don't find it then bail out.

Re:Uh Oh

[enjahova]

You act like its the government or some organization that is solely responsible for this invasion of privacy. It's just the natural progression of technology. You ask when do we get upset, where do we draw the line? There is no line, there is no revolution to be had. Cell phones are in the hundreds of millions world wide, camera phones are in the millions. How long before every camera is also has gps, and effortlessly syncs with any computer. Hell, it could just hop on whatever wifi and dump your pics online. Do you really think you could rebel against every person? This is technology you are against, not Big Brother.

You and I may think its wrong or rude or a "problem" that people invade our privacy and post pictures on line, but give it one or two generations of myspace and facebook, and whatever else the internet and technology throws our way. To you, it will look like the world has gone to shit, that privacy is non-existant and everybody is crazy. It has already happened to some extent, just like you said. Look 20 years ago, or look at people who were adults 20 years ago. A large percentage of them won't go anywhere near facebook or myspace. They don't understand it, they think if you do that everyone can see your life and your privacy is totally gone. But we do it everyday.