NZ gets Google Street View

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Hope you were smiling.

New Zealand became the seventh country to get Google Maps' Street View feature today, providing street-level, 360 degree images of most cities, suburbs, towns and tourist areas.

Google ANZ product manager Andrew Foster says tens of millions of photos of New Zealand street views are featured in the new service - and business will be able to add their own listings free.

Street View now appears as a standard option in the New Zealand version of Google Maps. Dragging a yellow Street View "pegman" icon onto any point on a public road shown in will bring up an image of the surroundings from a street-level vantage point, letting people check out a restaurant before arriving, arrange meeting points, save time at open houses on Saturday mornings, or just explore parts of New Zealand they haven't visited before, says Google.

Certainly, there will no longer be any scope for fibbing about street frontage in realestate ads.

Arrows allow people to navigate or zoom in and out of multiple photos of the same street scene. (If you left your car parked outside your mistress's house sometime between January and last week, proceed immediately to Your life on Google Street View, and how to delete it.)

Cellphone versions
Mobile versions of Street View New Zealand should also appear today optimised for BlackBerry and iPhone. A version for Symbian OS phones (such as Nokia's N series) is in the works, says Mr Foster, but with no set release date.
As with the PC version, you can twirl a view, or "look" up and down.

Free business listings
Street View lets you email or instant message a link to a particular photo - even at your preferred angle - or copy and paste Street View code to embed a street scene and directions into your website (see the scrollable street scene - outside NBR Towers, now less - at the top of this story). Street View photos can also be added to any step in Google Maps' onscreen or printed turn-by-turn driving or walking directions.

The Street View interface featured in any embedded link will automatically update, says Mr Foster, in a move designed to make it as easy as possible for small businesses to feature Street View scenes on their websites.

If you spot a photo of your business on Street View, you can tag it with a description (Street View NZ is already loaded with business listings from Finda, the directory Google bought from APN). Business listings are free, but Mr Foster says Google ANZ will send budding listers a code by postcard in the mail, by txt message or by an automated voice call. A person will then have to enter that code into Google Maps for their business listing to display.

Google will moneterise the service through its regular context-sensitive text ads, Mr Foster says, which appear on the bottom left of any Street View screen.

Mash-ups and overlays
A pre-release version of the service was shown to Tourism New Zealand, which may add a mash-up overlay, similar to the layer it has already put on Google Earth, says Mr Foster.

But Tourism NZ will have to wait until Google's next pass for the full New Zealand picture. A Google photo car was snowed out approaching the Milford Tunnel, says Ms Baxter, with the driver forced to turn back. The driver never returned.

Real Estate NZ also got an early look at the service, and this morning three big listing sites, TradeMe Property, Realestate.co.nz and Open2View went live with Street View (see TradeMe Property drops SMAPs).

The New Zealand Board of Geography teachers also got a preview. Chairwoman Annette Lanigan says Street View's landscape tools will probably be added to other Google services being used in schools, including Google Earth.

Better than Australia
Google-branded Holden Astras mounted with cameras have been cruising New Zealand streets since January to capture photos for the new service (and by going live today it beats a local photo mapping effort by the AA's Geosmart, which includes a Street View style component, and a parallel project being run by Wellington's Terralink).

The first Street View service launched in May 2007 - in the US, but driven by a team at the company's Sydney office, which now boasts 250 staff in total. Since then, Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and now New Zealand have been added.

Mr Foster could not say what percentage of New Zealand streets had been included in Street View, only that Google's database of photos now runs into the tens of millions. He does say that coverage is more comprehensive than Australia.

As in other countries, Google will continue to add photos after Street View launches. Some US cities are now on their second or third refresh, says Mr Foster.

Photo frequency differs by area, says Mr Foster, with Street View's photos of many urban streets allowing panoromas that offer multiple views of the same building or house. In rural areas, photo frequency falls to every 50m or 100m.

Below: Smile, you're on Street View - one of the fleet of panoramic camera-equipped Holden Astras that have been photographing New Zealand since January. Street View scenes from central Auckland, Devonport and Kumeu.