Seety: gazumping Google Street View for London

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Google’s been taking its sweet time over the release of Street View for the UK, and as happens when you take too long over something, another company’s gone and done it instead. Well, not the whole of the UK, just central London, but that’s good enough for me.

Visiting Seety.co.uk, you get a Google Map of central London, and you just click to open up a Street-View esque image of the area, which you can then navigate around with arrows. All faces are blurred, and some of the smaller roads haven’t quite been indexed, but the majority of central London is present and correct.

It stretches most of the way up Holloway Road to the north, and not very far south – just down to Elephant and Castle. Out east it stretches approximately to Bow and Limehouse, and west, you don’t make it much further than Shepherd’s Bush. It needs a bit of extension, then, but what’s present is very impressive, especially given the higgledy-piggledy layout of London’s streets compared to American cities.

It’s unfortunate, though, that as soon as Google brings out its own Street View product, which can’t be far off, then this will become mostly obsolete. Still, in the meantime, enjoy looking around London, and if you find anything interesting, send us the screenshot!

OPINION: Here's what I want from Google Latitude

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I don’t really care about privacy. I recognise the fact that other people do, but I don’t have anything to hide. Add that to the fact that I’m not especially interesting, and that I’ve been on the internet so long, and have such a unique name, that there’s a lot of me out there already.

That’s why I’m not bothered by commenters saying that Latitude is a massive privacy invasion. For me, the social proprioception offered by Latitude far outweighs the downsides of having my location available to my friends.