Windows Live Local now is offering street level views for parts of downtown Seattle and San Francisco.

Scoble says there are over 10 million images in the database:

They took a van with 10 cameras to Seattle and San Francisco (more cities coming soon) and built quite a remarkable AJAX app. Lots of fun. Drive your own car down the streets of San Francisco.

When I first clicked in and saw the three different views: rader, sports car (pictured above) and walking I was wowed by the interface. Impressive!

Pros
- cool views. The three different street views look fantastic, although the resolution when trying to look at the signs is grainy (hard to avoid that).
- it’s like driving to your location and could be handy for areas where there is full street level coverage
- just imagine IF you could be able to share “cool drives” with others! If you could record your drive around town and share that with other now that would be an awesome app. Could this be coming someday?

Cons
- mouse movement of car is difficult. Try moving the car with the mouse in the bottom frame. See if you aren’t almost immediately frustrated. Hint: it works much better using the arrow keys than the mouse
- I tried searching for “Ralph’s Grocery” which is on 4th street and where the Seattle Blog meetups are held the third Wednesday of the month. No combination of words in the first input box would show me this location. I tried putting in the address in the second box: 2035 4th Avenue and that put the car in the trees nearby. I was able to put the car on 4th and drive to the location, but only because I knew where it was at.
- limited coverage area. Just like Alexa’s business front locations this service is limited by the coverage it provides. If they had every major city covered that would be useful. I realize it is just a preview and more cities will be coming, but it needs to be available in at least all the major cities before it truly becomes useful.
- how to link to a location URL? Once I found the perfect car view for Ralph’s Grocery I wanted to link it up but … where?

Map wars continue
The future of mapping will be won by the company who first gives people the easiest and most thorough sense of where they want to go as well as being able to share this information easily and without copyright restrictions. For example, if we hold a picnic and invite others, we should be able to post this information on a webpage with links and easy direction material without having C&D letters arrive in our inboxes. Businesses should be able to provide a basic mapping feature for their prospective customers (further customization should be fee-based as it is currently).

Despite the cons listed above, where I’m intentionally being nitpicky on certain items, this is a positive mapping effort by Microsoft and I hope to see the coverage areas continue to expand.

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