Google Streetview comes to town

On March 27th of this year, Google added Street View data for Little Rock and surrounding cities. According to Wikipedia, it covers the following cities:
* Alexander
* Benton
* Bryant
* Cabot
* Carlisle
* Conway
* Greenbrier
* Heber Spring
* Jacksonville
* Mayflower
* Maumelle
* Pine Bluff
* Searey
* Sherwood
* Stuttgart
* Ward
* White Hall
I think that's a pretty impressive coverage area for an initial offering. Some roads are missing, especially newer subdivisions, but most of what I've looked for has been available.

If you're not familiar with Google Streetview, it's basically another layer of information that's been added to Google Maps. Before, when you looked up an address on Google maps, you could either use a satellite view, a street map, or a combination of the two. Now, they've added Streetview, where you can actually view a three-dimensional picture of the area. You can see anything that would be visible from the road. When you have the StreetView activated, roads that are covered are highlighted in blue.

To gather all the data, they got cars equipped with cameras on top and drove all over town. Then Google complied that information so that when you look up an address, you can view what the camera saw when it drove by. Once you're looking at an area, you can use arrows to move down the street or scroll the camera view in any direction for a better look. I'm not sure when the data was collected, but gas was $2.59 at the time:



The one complaint I do have is one I also have with google maps. The location you're at when you pull up an address is not always right in front of the address. This means that if you search for an address, you might have to move down the street a couple of houses to see the one that's actually at the address you entered. The service is still wildly useful for all sorts of things.