GeoGraphic

As of 15.30 Google Streetview is now live in the Republic of Ireland. Coverage is very impressive, and nearly every road in the country is on the system:

The images are of high quality, and should prove very popular. Ireland’s largest property website, Daft.ie, have been very quick off the mark and have integrated Streetview into their listings already:

It’ll be interesting to see what other uses the new data is put to over the coming days and months.

Of course it took less than an hour before there were some dissenting voices raising privacy concerns:

Which is par for the course. Happy mapping everyone, let me know if you find any funny or interesting images.

UPDATE: Official launch happened this morning, September 30th, and the data went live later on in the day on the Google Maps .com site (.ie will follow)
Click on ‘Pegman’ (this guy: to activate Streetview, and see my follow-up post here

There have been some murmurings on Twitter this evening about the possible launch of Google StreetView in the Republic of Ireland tomorrow, Thursday 30th September.

Possibly the clearest non-embargoed indicator comes from Ed Parsons (Google’s Chief GeoSpatial Technologist, @edparsons ) who tweeted this:

I expect Ed will spend much of the day dealing with ridiculous privacy concerns tomorrow. Certainly Google did themselves no favours when they captured a lot of private wifi network data, intentionally or not, but much of the posturing over privacy on this issue is overblown.

Much of the imagery captured will be over two years old, while individual faces and vehicle number-plates will be obscured. I am sure that certain Irish media outlets will be hunting high and low for possible breaches of privacy, and we can expect a ream of articles which will have images of (and maybe even links to) the houses of the rich and infamous.

To which I say “So what?”, but I’m sure Ed will be more eloquent.

Image from http://www.guia-buscadores.com/robotstxt-20

UPDATE: And via @doccer here’s a salient quote from an excellent opinion piece on StreetView and privacy in The Economist:

Yet there is a danger that by trying to please everyone, the government will satisfy no one. Privacy advocates will continue to seek tighter regulation. But as geo-data services continue to develop in unpredictable ways in less squeamish markets, tech companies operating in Germany are unlikely to sign up to overly restrictive rules.

The whole article is here:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/09/geo-data_germany

While browsing Google Maps earlier this evening I noticed that the ‘StreetView’ selector seemed to have gone live – that is “Pegman” as Google call it, turned yellow when the map was zoomed in:

Click on Pegman and move him onto the map and georeferenced photos from Google’s Panoramio service will appear:

Some of the geo-referencing is quite off, but much of it is good.  Here’s the official announcement from the Google lat/Long Blog.  Of course if you zoom out to show all of Europe, you can see the volume of georeferenced photos, but more interestingly, the areas where StreetView is currently available:

Is this update a precursor for the much anticipated arrival of StreetView here in Ireland?  No word yet on that, ‘early next year’ seems to be the sufficiently vague agreed date.