So today I was painting the outside of a house in an upscale subdivision in Grand Blanc, MI. Several times - at least four - a snazzily painted vehicle with “Google Street View” graphics all over it cruised slowly past the house. On the roof was mounted a…camera? Transmitter? Something complicated-looking on a platform, sort of like what you see on the top of TV news vans. Picture in the link.
When I look at google street view photos of a previous house I lived in, a van I owned at the time was shown in the driveway (couldn’t zoom in enough to see the license plate, I tried) and one of my cats is sitting on the front porch.
I understand they intentionally blur out license plates and faces, but I’m thinking I’ll be a little blurry person up on a ladder when this address hits Google street view. And my truck will be in the driveway.
Seriously, they pay people to drive cars or bikes or snowmobiles around the world for this. Isn’t this cool? I’m thinking that could be a fun, albeit sort of mindless job, for a while.
What does GSV show of your current address? I just checked - I bought the house I’m in now last summer, and the view is still of how it looked when I bought it.
The current GSV shows a planter pot in front of our house full of the flowers I planted in about May of this year, so they’ve come by in the last few months.
OTOH, it used to show our neighbors out having an argument in their driveway. I know they were fighting, because they never were both out in the driveway at the same time unless there was an altercation. And at that time, they didn’t blur faces out, either. That image has since been replaced by a neighbor-less one.
I am in there twice. Once if you go westbound on my street I am changing the oil in my car. If you go eastbound on the street I am talking to my neighbor as she hauls in her recycle bin. Heisenberg was right, you can be in two places at once.http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/images/smilies/biggrin.gif
Eh, they pay long-haul truckers to drive all around the world too and I never thought of that as a particularly exciting job.
Sure the Street View people get to see more cityscapes since they are going down every little road there is, but I still think it would get tedious pretty fast.
I was just behind one of those cars the other day. Drove like 2 miles down a major street and sat behind it at a light.
I just checked the route and I’m not on it, but the pictures are pretty old so maybe I’ll be uploaded soon!
I was disappointed when I did some work on my house last year, I went to go grab a screenshot of what my house looked like prior to my new deck, and the arial photos had been updated within the WEEK. My new deck was already there!
I think I’m on Street View in my car near my neighborhood. There’s a picture of the same model car that I drive, and it appears to be the same color but it’s hard to tell because it was taken on an overcast day. I fit is me, I didn’t notice the Google van when it happened.
You know, your mentioning this frequency of updates issue got me thinking: I really hope they are archiving all the old data. It will make for some incredibly cool time-lapse animations years down the line.
ETA: in fact, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if one day our computers are powerful enough and data storage trivial enough that Street View and the like could incorporate a “historical view” slider so if you wanted to see what an area looked like 40 years ago you could just scrub the slider back and forth. How cool would that be?
“A friend of mine heard about a guy” who saw the G-Mobile doing the slow cruise in a small downtown area near San Francisco, ran like hell to get a block ahead of it and then stopped while it passed, repeated the maneuver half a dozen times. His goal was to supernaturally appear again and again in the eventual online streetview.
I trust my friend but wonder if it’s a true story. Kind of funny is it is. I guess.
Not me, but one of my sisters. The GSV of the house she was renting showed her vehicle in the driveway. Except, on closer inspection, it wasn’t her vehicle. Apparently some previous tenants owned a vehicle that was the same make, model, generation and color as hers. Trippy!
back at the old homestead, my old man is standing in the door of the bottom porch, looking at the truck and saying WTF you doing on my street. At the shop, I can pinpoint the day by the cars in the lot.
Funniest, a mile down the street, the Fed Ex guy getting towed.
Not google but, on the assessors map, obviously from the morning, my truck is the only one still at the local bar. I must have gone home with the bartender.
They must have just gone past this week, it shows my roomies truck and stuff staged from coming back from Pennsic leaned up against the house. It has to have been between 7 am and 7 pm, as one of the cars is missing, mrAru drives it to work most days. And the geese are missing from the driveway the way they were in the last pictures.
There’s a house a few miles from where I live that has life-size statues of Jake and Elwood Blues in the front yard. The blurring software decided these were real people, and obfuscated them. Check out the house at the northeast corner of Ingersoll Rd and West Grand River Ave, Lansing, MI. If you see a big orange cement mixer but no Blues Brothers, keep looking - you’re in the right area.
Heh - they must have passed by my street pretty recently - we’ve got all three cars parked out front because SpouseO’s replacing our trim and is using the garage and driveway as his wood working area. However, the satellite view is still pretty old. It’s showing my backyard with the canoe and rock garden, which hasn’t been there in like four-five years now. (We replaced it with a fancy patio. And gave the canoe back to my parents.)
