Microsoft’s Live.com is launching a preview version of a new service called Street-Side today (link will be live around 12 PST today). Street-Side will augment the Live Local service and give street level views of the entire city. Searches can be made by address or business name, and you can “drive” around the city using the arrow keys. See the screen shot below for a visual.
See Robert Scoble’s Channel 9 Video for his interview with the team.
The service will initially target San Francisco and Seattle only due to the massive number of images needed to support make it work (rumors are 10 million + images per city).
The Live.com team sent out an email to journalists that includes the following information:
* Today we are announcing our new street-side initiative for Windows Live Local and a Technical preview of the new street-side feature.
* The street-side initiative is a key part of our vision to deliver an immersive digital representation of the real world that enables users to know their surroundings, find what they are looking for and know how to get there.
* The new street-side feature augments the current map view, aerial view, and bird’s eye view that the Windows Live Local site already has today to provide users with an even more immersive way to explore their local environment.
Live.com continues to crush competiting ajax homepage competitors (see link for Alexa chart). Services like Street-Side will make it even harder for others to compete.
Screen shot:
Sounds a bit like that A9 site.
cool but very jumpy. also not sure what use i would have for something like this.
http://preview.local.live.com
Went live a little while ago.
Think of all those car games in the arcades back in the old days.
Hook me up with some other drivers and this is just way too cool.
It’s crazy.
“Live.com continues to crush competiting ajax homepage competitors (see link for Alexa chart)”
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t Alexa get data from Internet Explorer users, who have the Alexa toolbar? Don’t you think those users will have a significantly strong bias to using Live.com instead of stuff like Netvibes, or RSS stuff in general?
Check out the video on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showp.....tid=166518 (I interview the team).
very nice! On one image I saw the van that they use to take the images in a shop window mirroring!
This service is so great!!!…for the less than 5% of the world that lives in the States. Everyone else is SOL. Microsoft can’t even get sattellite footage for major Canadian cities! Google’s coverage extends almost completely around the world. Try getting imagery for Calgary, Toronto or Montreal. Try Paris, London and Berlin. There is nothing! Now try those cities using Google Local.
Sorry Microsoft, you continue catering to your 5% of the market, everyone else who isn’t American will stick with better services.
Call me crazy, but this frustrates me…what here is the killer application? What’s the great innovation Is this not a sort of easy to imagine mashup, play on plays with no great purpose other than to check to see if your own street is on there, which most likely it is not. And, by the time it is, i hope there will be some innovation on your identity front anyhow.
So Microsoft takes ideas Google Maps and A9 and puts them together for the first time ever. Take that, people who say Microsoft can’t innovate!
To be fair, I guess Microsoft did have Terra Server before anyone thought of looking at satelite photos online.
I agree with Ryan above, but I suspect USA has a lot more than 5% of the market share. Microsoft is likely to keep this to big American cities, because the expense of photographing cities like this is too much to do to every little city in the world. And remeber that cities change a lot more from the ground then they do from the sky, so each city is more than a one time cost.
really nice.
This would be useful for for pretrip travel plans, if it’s implemented in other cities, or even for finding out more about my own city.
As for innovation… well how many things from Yahoo and Google are actually inhouse innovations, versus buyouts anyway….
This is not a killer service.
I find the interface awkward and counterintuitive. Just as their Bird’s Eye view looks good in static shots, actually using the service is frustrating.
The proper was to go is not to get more and more imagery but to get a better abstracted idea of whats really there.
I want to be able to walk a virtual block in 3D, not some clunky slideshow. I want to be able to look up each business in a given building, not get an off-center view of the storefront. (Which A9 already does better).
I want a single pane app which doesn’t put gimmicky crap like a “race-car” in the way of the experience.
This is the navigation equivelent of Adventure; go left, go right, I’m sorry I can’t move like that. What I expect is at least DOOM, and preferably DOOM 3.
-Ian
Ian - I agree, a Doom-like interface would be cool. I’d also like to have lasers and blow stuff up as I move around the city.
Funny - take the limitations and constraints of viewing the world from within an an automobile and apply them directly to an online application.
Why can I change my field of view in only 90 degree increments (surely they could have taken 360 degree pictures at regular intervals, allowing for a practically complete field of view)?
Why should I see an ugly and obscuring dashboard?
I see that there is a “walk” view that shows a cleaner user interface. It is now clear to me that Microsoft forces the automobile metaphor and ugly dashboard to help explain the very-confusing user interface.
Microsoft! Nice signs of life but clean up your act please.
Ryan mentioned this being a US-centric service. It’s only a technology preview so that was kind of inevitable. In the Channel9 interview there is an acknowledgment of how non-trivial grabbing the images is aswell of a mention of how they might make a “add your own” community feature.
They should make this faster. I wouldn’t mind a little preload time for a smooth-scrolling ride. Vroom vroom!
Need’s some more work but it is vey cool …
it is interesting
by
raja
good