Taking Voyeurism to New Level

I’ve previously extolled the world conquering capability of Google and now we can add more bad ass functionality to the list. They have this thing called street view on http://www.googlemaps.com/ that lets you check out street level views of places like you were standing there with your own two eyes. In Philly you can check things out from 360 degrees around and up and down.

How do you find this fantasticness you ask? When you enter a location on the map, if street view is available, the option will appear in the top right navigation (next to the traffic button). It appears to be a fairly new feature so they only have the larger US cities (and some of their surrounding communities). You'll also find some weird dead ends in coverage - I guess they had to stop somewhere.

I found this all quite by accident when I went to find something on the map. So I started checking out places I used to live, historic sites in the city and then all the places that I wouldn’t go for fear of being riddled with bullets.

There are a bunch of other cities (you can tell by the little camera over the city name when you click “street view” at the zoomed out view) but I haven’t found another one like Philadelphia that you can look 360 degrees up and down as well.

Check it out, here’s my college apartment! It’s entirely possible that I spent more time drunk in this building than sober. On that note, I’ll leave you with the following warning: this can be highly addictive. You shouldn’t undertake any serious sightseeing without having some time on your hands…and a pretty good computer because it will basically kill whatever else you’re doing.