Where-type questions — the kind that result in a little map popping up on the search-results page — account for some 20 percent of all Google queries done from the desktop. But ultimately more important by far is location-awareness, the sort of geographical information that our phones and other mobile devices already require in order to function. In the future, such location-awareness will be built into more than just phones. All of our stuff will know where it is — and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that they’re still on your desk at work. Your tools will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your tools.
While no one can say exactly how we will get from the current moment to that Jetsonian future, one thing for sure can be said about location-awareness: maps are required. Tomorrow’s map, integrally connected to everything that moves (the keys, the tools, the car), will be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; it’s a contest over the future itself. (...)
Microsoft’s Streetside debuted in 2006 with a photographic rendering of parts of Seattle and San Francisco. Google’s Street View arrived a year later, with five cities: San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver. Google eventually overwhelmed Microsoft with a more aggressive surveying program. Street View now covers 3,000 cities in 54 countries, and it has gone beyond streets and onto train tracks, hiking trails, even rivers. A section of the Amazon was the first river, appearing last year; the Thames made its debut in October; and the Colorado will be available by the end of the year. “We want to paint the world,” Vincent says. When I asked him what level of resolution we were talking about, he said, “About one pixel to the inch.”
By threading photograph after photograph along the lines that mark the byways and highways on the map, Vincent and his team are making, in effect, one large photograph of the globe. It’s a neat trick, perhaps even the next conceptual leap for cartography, but like most things Google spends a lot of money on, very likely to be more useful that it first appears. Like most people when they first encounter Street View, O’Reilly used it to check out the photo of his house. But then, he says, he later began to see the potential of the data collected by Google and to imagine more and more uses for it.
by Adam Fisher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dan Winters for The New York Times
