Google Enhances Street View With User Photos

Google has launched a competitor or counterpart to Microsoft's Photosynth, which employs user-contributed photos of much-photographed sites to supplement the street-level view in an immersive way. Google's offering is called simply Navigate through User Photos, and unlike Photosynth — which requires Sliverlight and therefore is not available on Linux — is implemented in Flash. This YouTube video (also embedded at the link above) offers a quick tour of the new feature, which can use photos uploaded to Panoramico, Flickr, and Picasa.

Re:uhg silverlight works in linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Run! It's a trap!

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[tepples]

Moonlight has two drawbacks:

• Moonlight is perpetually a version behind Microsoft Silverlight, resulting in Silverlight apps displaying only "your Silverlight plug-in is outdated".
• Outside Microsoft, a major use for Silverlight is to stream video with digital restrictions management to make it significantly harder to save to the viewer's PC. Free software is fundamentally incompatible with this DRM.

Brownies

[l00sr]

...unlike Photosynth — which requires Sliverlight and therefore is not available on Linux — is implemented in Flash

I'm thinking of making some crack brownies that are delicious and unlike pot brownies--which have pot in them and are therefore dangerous--have crack in them.

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[MushMouth]

How is B) any different than the use of Flash (which this Johnny-Come-Lately google app uses)? Especially considering Moonlight is fully open source, which no version of flash 10 is.

photos

[owlnation]

I hope there's someone vetting the pics. One of the most annoying aspects of Panoramico, is that there's more than a few narcissists who post pics of things like "our dog Benji at the beach," rather than an informative pic that will enhance the Google Earth user-experience.

Still... if no-one is vetting the pics, there is a LOT of fun to be had with this.

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[sopssa]

But that's only the Linux developers fault as they're lagging behind on the specs. The specs are out there to code it, you can't really blame MS for it.

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[pherthyl]

Sure you can. If Microsoft wants to replace Flash then they damn well should be supporting Linux. If they don't then they shouldn't be surprised that some people will avoid Silverlight. It's not the communities' job to do Microsoft's porting work for them, just like Adobe doesn't expect the community to write a Linux flash client.

Re:uh silverlight works in linux

[Rayban]

How does Moonlight figure into it? That's like saying Flash is open-source because Gnash exists. Both are incomplete re-implementations of proprietary plugins. Neither of them can catch up to the canonical implementation.