» Google Maps “Street View” and Portland

Google Maps “Street View” and Portland

December 18th, 2007

Wow, wow, wow!

My brother told me he spotted my house on Google Maps. I said, yeah, the satellite view ain’t that great… you can’t see that much detail. He said, NO, I can see YOU in front of your house from the street view.

WHAT?!

Yep… go to Google Maps. Go to Portland. Click on “Street View”. Then click on any street in Portland. Now you can “walk” the street up and down, and even rotate the camera right and left (and up and down). Amazing. Absolutely so cool.

If you look at where this is nationally, there are a few big cities, but Portland is lucky in that more or less our WHOLE CITY is on Google Maps Streetview (as opposed to, say, Los Angeles which has maybe 10% of the streets).

I actually saw one of the vans driving around with one of the weird black “globes” on the roof. And if you look at any streetview and pan “down”, you can see the vehicle taking the photos.

It looks like most of the photographing is done early in the am, as there are very few cars on the street. The freeways are more or less empty… weird. Maybe Sunday afternoon or morning. Hmmm, come to think of it, the time that I saw the van was Sunday morning.

For example, here is the 405 going over the river…

This helps date things (the Bagdad (sic) on Hawthorne)… click for larger:

4 Comments Add your own

1. stan | December 19th, 2007 at 8:43 am

I’m not sure when they went through town and how long it took, but I’ve looked at the Street View of my house (NE PDX)and they did it around the time I was moving in, which would put it roughly in late July ‘07, Somewhere after the 24th. It is very, very addicting.

Another cool thing about street view is that is more recent than the Google satellite feature As an example the new Metropolitan building in the Pearl on Lovejoy and 10th wasn’t even under construction when the Sat photo was taken, but in Street view the building is more or less completed. I don’t think the gap is more than a couple of years.
2. Peter Bray | December 19th, 2007 at 5:07 pm

One thing that you would expect from all of Google map projects is the ability to cycle through different satellite photos of a particular place… this would be revealing to follow sprawl/development trends.
3. Portland Oregon Real Estate Guy | December 19th, 2007 at 7:17 pm

I love this new feature. I didnt find my self in the front yard, I guess I need to spent more time outside. LOL. Oh yeah I saw the van too. I wonder if this will create any law suits. Google isn’t blurring the faces.

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