Google Earth

First in-strip F-word! Yay!!

I have a long and storied history with internet mapping. A long, long time ago, MapQuest, who was pretty much the only game in town at the time, became the first site to give you the option of seeing satellite views of something. I've always been a huge nerd for aerial photography, so I thought this was pretty much the greatest thing ever, and I immediately went about assembling a ginormous patchwork-quilt poster of Manhattan from dozens of MapQuest's tiny little photo bits (the entire view at this point was maybe a 300px-wide square). Said poster come out to around 3' by 5', and is hanging on the wall behind me as I type this.

Fast-forward several years; Google Maps made it much fancier and more useful, but satellite photography was still pretty much it. Enter Street View. The day I discovered that quickly became a maelstrom of nostalgia as I first zoomed around to famous places I'd visited, then the homes of family members, and finally all my old apartments going back to college - I even looked up the alley where I got mugged once.

And it was on there!

So surely Street View was as good as it could get, right? I flirted briefly with Google Earth when it was first released as its own application, but in those days it wasn't nearly fleshed out enough to really get its point across. Recently, though, they've integrated it with Google Maps, which has triggered yet another wave of obsessive zooming - except this time I'm literally flying over and around three-dimensional buildings!!

As far as things have come in ten years or so, Google Earth still feels like it's only just getting started. Huge swaths of Pittsburgh, for example, have barely been touched by the modelers, and even my own not-inconsiderable internet speeds can take a bit to really give you a fully-realized major metropolitan area.

But imagine what we'll be able to do with this in another ten years?