New Google Street Views

For those who haven’t yet heard about it, Google Street View is a service that provides panoramic views (360°) taken from the streets of many big cities in the world. The service was launched in May 2007, and orginally only featured cities in the US. Now the platform has expanded to include some of these countries (amongst others): France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, the UK, Japan, Australia…

We were very excited to see that most of France’s major cities are now covered: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille, Rennes, Montpellier, Nantes and Strasbourg are just a few. A good way of finding out which cities and countries are mapped, is to unzoom a bit (check out the picture on the left of this blog post), and then drag that little orange fellow on the map. All areas covered by street view will then be colored in blue.

You can find quite a few interesting ways of using this service. It can come in handy if you want to locate a specific shop / restaurant in a street you haven’t been to before. Another fun thing to do is to roam the streets of cities you’ve never been to: feel like walking in Tokyo or Sydney? Although it doesn’t seem that google is monetizing this service yet (no ads are displayed on the street view), we can imagine quite a few business perspectives for the future: imagine a platform where you could virtually walk the streets of Paris, enter a shop, and start buying things during your virtual tour of that specific boutique. Hey… is street view the future of e-commerce and online shopping? Let’s not get too excited now…