This is probably the creepiest thing I have ever seen on Streetview. The video below shows the Streetview images of Garrido’s house, the man who kidnapped and kept a girl in captivity for 18 years. The scary thing is that the kidnapper actually follows the Goocar around in his van!

So so weird!

Found via Best Viral.

It might be because Streetview needs a little positive advocacy these days, but the Google Maps team released a note on their blog about a new feature that leverages Streeview to display the image of a business on a map:

We use the position of the business on the map to approximately display it as a 3D marker in Street View. We are continuously working on improving the quality of the underlying map, and this will result in more and more businesses being positioned with high accuracy in Street View over time.

In other words, it’s not very precise. But it sounds pretty fun! Just have a look at the quick demo below to see how it works:

This looks pretty good, and it could be really useful on my cell phone. Unfortunately, I tried it on my Android and the same feature wasn’t there. Too bad, I could use this business-spotter when I find myself in unknown neighborhoods.

It is interesting to be a spectator of how Google pioneers augmented reality solutions for businesses. As mentioned above, the technology is somewhat clunky for the time being, but it clearly exemplifies Google Maps’ goal to own the virtual reality space, and sell it back to local businesses. I wonder if a business with no marketing budget for Google Maps will end up dying, given that our phones will become the best way for us to know where to go.

It makes little doubt today that Google is the most universalist company of the twenty-first century:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.(From Google Corporate Site)

Google-owned Blogger just celebrated its 10 years anniversary, and focused their communications on the 300 millions blogs created. As of today, Google can translate 50+ different languages into your own. On Youtube, if you submit captions with your video, then foreign viewers can watch your video in 50+ languages instantly. Google is literally cracking open the Tower of Babel dilemma, by offering a technology that offers one universal language. Is Google better than Jesus?

Maybe not so. Google has one huge problem: its Maps! Maps is Google’s most beautiful product, but it is also the most problematic, because it pushes the search company to get into the muddy waters of geopolitics.

Recently, Switzerland asked Google to take away Streetview from Switzerland’s Google Maps. The neutral central-European country explains that despite Google’s responsiveness for Streetview’s users’ complaints, the privacy of its citizens is too much at stakes.

You can get more details about this news in this Information Week article. To emphasize on Google’s problems with Streetview in general, writer Thomas Claburn provides other examples where Google Maps’ technology failed when applied in different cultures. For example:

Street View has also met resistance in Japan. Google was asked to re-shoot Street View images in twelve Japanese cities using cameras positioned lower to the ground, to avoid photographing over the fences protecting people’s yards.

Wow, couldn’t they figure that out before shooting every street corners of Japan?