The Google Street View car

If you have a fast internet connection and some free time on your hands (a lot of free time might be a good idea), have a look at the new Google Maps Street View mode - they're adding photographed roads at an astounding pace these days.

It seems that, upon returning to familiar map areas over the last few months, more and more of the streets illuminate in blue (indicating Street View coverage) when you start dragging that little yellow guy from his perch atop the zoom control onto the map.

The folks at Zillow were amused the other day when they saw the shadow of a Street View car on one of the roads where they were taking a virtual road trip and they filed this report.

There are a whole slew of pictures of other Street View cars over at Google Images where they appear to have a new state of the art 100 megapixel camera - if it works half as good as it looks, it's sure to be a winner.

The oddest thing that I've experienced with Street View is that, since photos are only taken as the Street View car moves in one direction, in order to navigate in the opposite direction, you get this weird "against the flow of traffic" feeling where you're sometimes staring at the guy driving behind the Street View car for blocks and blocks as you're both going backwards.