Satellite mapping of cities is cool. Ditto street-level services like Amazon's
A9. Combine them and you've got something like
this demo of Windows Live Local - Virtual Earth.
The service allows you to "drive" or "walk" around a city, viewing
where you are on an overhead satellite view linked to photos of the
street you're on -- looking straight ahead and to the left and right.
In the left-right views, you can see shop fronts. For now, you can
cruise around downtown Seattle and San Francisco.
The interface is a bit funky, but it's still a beta service. You use
the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate through the city, but I
found the camera turning down streets when I didn't mean to. And the
images didn't always load quickly for me, even though I have a usually
satisfactorily speedy broadband connection.
Still, it's a pretty amazing technology demonstration. Thanks to Poynter's
Larry Larsen for the pointer.
