Twelve Black Code Monkeys

When Terra Server went online way back in 1996 I believe it was amazing to be able to look up satellite imagery of your old hometown or favorite vacation spots. Of course back then the images were from the early nineties or even older, so the level of detail was pretty low. Over the years I guess the U.S. government has gotten less paranoid about the stuff, even with 9/11.

When Google put out there online mapping site not too long ago, I found it to have one of the best interfaces, allowing you to seamlessly scroll around extremely easily. It didn’t have some of the bells and whistles that would have made it more powerful, and I did find that with slower computers and slower connections it wasn’t nearly as fluid, but it was still better than the alternatives.

Just the other day Google added a nice feature to Google Maps – satellite imagery. Anywhere in the US, anyway, you can switch between the regular graphical map or the actual satellite photo. The same interface is present on both, so you can click and drag around the satellite photos just as you can with the graphical version. You can view the photos from multiple zoom levels, but here is where the only limitation comes in. It appears that you can’t get nearly as close up as you can with the graphical interface, so while you can make out individual houses, distinguishing a car, for example, cars are so small as to be mere specks. Terra Server allows me to zoom in many more times so that, for example, I can distinguish car windows, even the lines on tennis and basketball courts! I hope that Google increases their resolution.

Of course this feature is mainly a kind of eye-candy thing. It’s neat to be able to look at a photo of any place in the U.S. at the push of a button, albeit one that is fairly low res. And while I think it will be great when we can distinguish license plate numbers, the real usefulness for the vast majority of people won’t come until you can pull up either a live moving image, or even a static image taken with the last minute of a given area – for example to check that your house is still there while on vacation or more realistically what kind of traffic is up ahead so that you can reroute.

Google maps still lack a lot of the flexibility that can be found in true mapping software that allow you to dynamically label individual points of interest, create your own sets of directions, etc. These things are way beyond other such online mapping tools, but at least one thing I’d like to see on Google which I don’t think would be at all hard to implement for them is just a simple legend that tells people how large the distances are at a given zoom level. It is just very convenient to eyeball how far a couple of items are on a map by such a legend rather than the much more time-consuming task of trying to plug the addresses in to get directions from one to another…