Amazon Goes to Ground in Online Map Battle

Not content to show you an address from x feet up in the air, Amazon is offering street-level views of business addresses. That's the good news. The bad news is that you can only get the views from a limited number of cities. But start anyway at http://maps.a9.com/ .

There are a couple dozen cities here containing most of the usual suspects for major citydom -- Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Miami, Fargo -- Fargo??! Pick a city.

I looked at Washington DC as it was one of the few places where I actually had a chance in heck to recognize anything. You'll get a map of the area with a checkbox toggle to show those streets which have had their pictures taken. On the right side of the page there's a photo of where the map starts and a "filmstrip" of thumbnails below. A second filmstrip underneath that shows you the view on the other side of the street. Click on the large photo for an even larger version in a pop-up window.

I tried to find the Washington Hilton where they hold Computers in Libraries. I found a picture but couldn't figure out what it was. I squinted at it, trying to think what aspect of the building this represented, and realized finally from the context of the thumbnails that I was looking at the side of a bus. There are pictures of the building, true, but they're interspersed with lovely bus fronts, middles, and ends.

(You'd think they would have taken those out.)

I clicked on the magnifying glass and dragged it a little further down the street, going all the way down to the Starbucks at the Circle. For some stretches there were pictures available on only one side of the street. You can also click on either end of the filmstrips to walk down the street.

Amazon has gone out of their way to make this easy to use, but I had some trouble with it, probably because it's just not something I'm used to looking at. It would be nice if there was some kind of ongoing text-based guidance of what I'm looking at. (An address, or lat/long, but ideally both.) Also, it would be nice if there was a little editing of the photographs. Buses blocked some of the shots and in some of the pictures it was too dark to see anything but streetlights.

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