Amazon maps have block-by-block views

by on November 26, 2005

This isn’t really that new, but I think it’s worth pointing out. Amazon’s A9 Maps have block-by-block views on many American cities. They drove a car with a camera down the streets and recorded the images on a Windows-based laptop along with GPS data.

I still like Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, or Google Maps better, though, mostly because of the draggable AJAX-based interface. I hate waiting for a map to refresh. Google really changed my expectations of what a map should do.

But, if you need to know what a store looks like before going there, Amazon is definitely something you should check out.

  • Miles Archer
    Is your house on their map? It's pretty creepy to have pictures of your neighborhood on line. Intellectually, it makes perfect sense, but it still creeps me out.

    I don't get the same sense of dread from the pictures of my roof on the other sites.
  • I thought that service would exist sooner...

    In France, there's wanadoo.fr with similar functionnality for a small number of french cities.
    The service's discoverability in the big website, and its UI suck tremendously, but it's proving to be very useful in my search for a new flat!

    (By the way, if anyone knows of an apartment for rent in Paris, circa 50~70 sqm, 2 bedrooms, not more than 1250 euros/month, contact me? It's getting ridiculous.)
  • Now all they need is to write some applications for mobile phones with GPS and cameras in them so wherever I am in the country I can take a picture have it go right into their system (maybe some censorship ;)) so we can all contribute and make it happen for "everywhere" faster.
  • It's interesting that they use the Mechanical Turk to try to identify the most appropriate pictures of companies in the Amazon ecology. All the MT jobs I've seen so far are of the "which is the most appropriate pic of X".

    My theory is that the MT was invented originally as a way of Amazon to buy cheap help with this image database.
  • I've seen lotsa buzz about it, over time, but didn't really check it out. Until recently, when it came time to arrange a rendezvous with someone -- my new WriteGirl mentee (WriteGirl pairs adult professional women writers with jr high and high school age girls to help 'em with their writing skills).

    When starting out from scratch with someone who's barely old enough to drive, and prolly doesn't have that "map in her head" for local areas yet, and I don't know how tech-savvy she is (no joy here), the yellowpages with images are very good for arranging a rendezvous point. Find place she mentioned. Go to tinyurl and make url small. Send email saying, Is this the place you mean? And go from there.
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