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Hot on the heels of Google, Microsoft have released their tech preview of using Flickr photos with maps. Only using just Creative Commons photos, so feels a little more Opt-In.

More info here: Spatial Search: The Next Frontier

I think John Allspaw sums it up pretty well with …

“Fuck. Easily the coolest shit I have seen in a very long time.”

As did Aaron with “(this made my day)” …

This, is what geotagging photos is all about, it’s about having enough of them, millions and millions, so that they can be thrown through complex analysis, allowing them to be matched up, combined, calculated and computed into a geo-spatal context. It’s also about people sharing the world about them.

Start of mini rant

You’ll see that all these advances are made by Google and Microsoft, and in each case they’ve had to use the API (and thank fuck we have one!) to grab the photos, download them and process them.

Yahoo, who has direct access to all the photos and metadata, including extra EXIF data that you can’t get via the API, it’s just sitting there on the disks … isn’t … you may notice, producing any tech demos, or videos of its latest research.

I can’t even begin to say how frustrating this is, or at least was, I’m a little bit more over it now that I’m no longer working at Yahoo.

It is … there was … brickhouse … smart people, it … ah I can’t even find the words to fully explain it. Yahoo has let so many opportunities and good people slip through its fingers, that it makes me a little bit sick thinking about it.

So I’ll stop

End of mini rant

Anyway, great work Blaise and the rest of the team over at Microsoft. Thank you so much for doing what you’re doing.

Google have just updated their Street View to include Flickr Photos …

… you can see this in action here.

Flickr joins Panaramio and Picasa as a source of photos. Flickr has always had plenty of good quality geotagged photos, so this looks like a handy addition to the whole Street View thing. No word on how many Flickr photos they’ve used, or if it’s just for certain locations, but I’m sure there’ll be some official word at some point.

But wait, there’s more:

Flickr photos have also been crunched into google’s image brain …

… not only allowing for seamless picture-zooming between Flickr, Picasa & Panaramio photos, but it also means Google has a bit more understand of where a photo is and it’s context to the surrounding area than Flickr itself has. I guess this means they’ll make it onto the iPad version of GoogleMaps too.

Which is kinda neat.

Not quite sure how the copyright works out though. Traditionally image search results have shown thumbnails, which are fine as search results. Here fullsized images are being shown, and considering they must have been downloaded to be processed for the image-zoomy thing, they’re probably being served from Googles servers.

Haven’t sniffed the traffic while Flash loads them, so not sure yet.

Photos shown: seattle space needle #3 by lomokev & IMG_5811: Space Needle by ac4lt

(via Kellan)