Earth + Street View: Google Stays Ahead in the Race to Build a Mirror World
March 31 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Business & Work Year: 2008 Rating: 6
Rumor has it that Google is set to make available its Street View software directly through the already formidable and engaging Earth platform.
Rafe Needleman over at Webware reports: “A source tells me that the Google Earth app will get the Street View feature, currently available only in the browser-based Google Maps service, within a few weeks. What’s not clear is whether this refers to general release or internal testing.”
While this merger may at first glance seem like a novelty, it marks another significant step in Google’s relentless march toward the real-time quantification of the entire planet, aka the creation of a total systems Mirror World .
Check out this demo of Street View if you haven’t already explored the product/service:
As the company strives to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, Street View integration is an inevitable step for Google Earth and is likely to be followed by inter-stitched geo-tagged photos, richer layers of user-generated content, more up-to-date / high-rez satellite imagery, plus whatever additional applications the behemoth can conceive and implement. The stakes are simply to high for the company not continue adding info nodes and value to their budding centralized network.
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The benefits of such a steady Earth-quantification effort are immense. This may well become THE ultimate resource tool vaguely sketched out in Neal Stephenson Snow Crash, an information system that generates enormous efficiency for researchers, businesses, advertisers, etc. Paired with Google’s world-class search technology, the value to information consumers would be immense. At the same time, Google will most definitely continue to discover new ways to monetize the experience, racking up more and more revenue as the site proves invaluable to the people of the world.
It seems rather inevitable that someone will develop a grand application of this nature, does it not?
This is primary reason why I believe Google stock is significantly under-valued. There’s no way that Microsoft or Yahoo will catch them in the quantification game—and if not them, then who?
Whichever company wins the systems quant race is going to make a hereto unprecedented amount of cash.
