Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

According to several sources Google Street View has been spotted in Seattle.

This is good news. I feel like they have been spiting us. In fact we’re one of only two of the top 15 US metros that don’t have Street View (the ones in bold have Street View):

1. New York
   
2. Los Angeles
   
3. Chicago
   
4. Dallas
   
5. Philadelphia
   
6. Houston
   
7. Miami
   
8. Washington DC

9. Atlanta
   
10. Boston
    
11. Detroit
    
12. San Francisco
    
13. Phoenix
    
14. Riverside
    
15. Seattle

Bonus link: Google Street View car gets pulled over

Google Earth, meet the browser.

Maybe we’ll sneak this into the release where we add Google Street View to our details pages…

Google also recently announced, Love My Maps? Use its Line and Shape Editing in your API Apps!

Good for Google for continually expanding their API.

Update: After installing the plugin which took way longer than expected (even though you download the plugin it needs to connect back to Google to download more stuff) I’m not too impressed with this at all. On my 2ghz Intel laptop with 3.25 GB or RAM it runs incredibly slow. So slow that my mouse cursor doesn’t even move smoothly over the Google Earth div and music playback gets choppy.

I think the combination of traditional aerial maps + Virtual Earth Bird’s eye + Google Street View is plenty of imagery. Google Earth doesn’t add anything to that equation.

Trulia Hindsight is a pretty neat method of visually building trends.

What I wonder about is why they used Microsoft’s Virtual Earth for Hindsight and yet use Google Maps for their main search site. Anyone know?

We’ve certainly debated the merits of each but our conclusions are likely biased since we’ve only done a really deep dive on Virtual Earth. It would be great to hear how they feel after implementing sites with both.

One of our developers noticed that Google added a Street View in San Francisco recently. Here’s the view of the front door of our SF office:

It looks really sharp. We’d love to see similar functionality in the Virtual Earth API so that we could display street level imagery on the details pages for listings displayed on Redfin.

I see Google recently added 3d images of buildings in road view, Google Maps News - Transit, Rail, Buildings, Businesses. Here’s a link to their downtown Seattle view. Hopefully Virtual Earth adds this :).