Google this morning added 6 new cities to Street View and updated the Flash viewer so you can now pan up and down. The new cities are Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Tucson.

Details at Google Lat Long blog here: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-street-view-cities-to-explore.html

This file lists the bounds of the current active cities:

http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/cb/bounds_cippppt.txt

Can't wait to see what "interesting" Google Street View finds will surface from this round of cities!

All of the new cities were photographed by Google. None of the new streetview images in those cities show a copyright of Immersive Media.

I Phoenix area looks really bad. the sun adds a funky blue color to some of the pictures. they are very bright. and some of the images cut off in some areas. kinda choppy... and lame.

its pretty extensive in chicago , going miles north to a lot of small towns.
see here:
http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=42.446515,-88.008728&spn=0.103109,0.335426&z=12&om=1&layer=c

it also goes into the countryside around Pittsburg.
nice!

wooded scenery , north of chicago
http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=42.460574,-88.187428&spn=0.025772,0.083857&z=14&om=1&layer=c&cbll=42.447332,-88.188305&cbp=1,542.1732555119839,0.5,0,-6.1749086137647

i like this update – you can now go for a drive in the countryside, not just the city itself.

check out philadelphia – there's quite a lot of the surrounding countryside covered...
link:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=philadelphia&ie=UTF8&ll=39.872858,-75.509033&spn=0.428957,0.891266&t=k&z=10&om=1&layer=c

And first shoots from Chicago are here already:

Show us your Google Street View Chicago finds
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/technology_internetcritic/2007/10/show-us-your-go.html

i think Google is missing a trick here – who wouldn't love to have a job driving around a city or countryside taking streetview photos.

if you have a travel wanderlust it would be an incredibly interesting job – and you wouldnt need to have a Phd to do it.

you wouldnt need to be a Google Employee either – just be on contract, with some stock options as a sweetener. Google could supply the photography kit, you supply the car.

it'd be a great way to explore some cities in Europe – and at the same time add to StreetView. i'd certainly sign up for it.

I won't. It's going be so boring.

Anyways, I listed a couple of future candidates to be on Street Views. (with links to photos, of course :P)
http://googlified.com/2007spotting-google-street-view-cars/

I hope Google learns how to blur faces so they can bring this stuff to more privacy-sensitive countries too...

Good feature request Philipp. They could use their staff from the Neven Vision acquisition to work on that. :)

Awesome, I have been waiting for Chicago.

Also, that restaurant in the photo is really good! Greek Islands on Halsted, two thumbs up :)

So there is a Web service to get the panorama ID that allows you to display the Street View. By specifying a different parameter, you can get images.

Perhaps Google (or someone else) should put together a system that let's you select which images have a 'face' in them – different people get a random selection and the photos that people mark most as having faces get screened by a Google employee.

Perhaps, Google gives you a tiny amount of cash for any one you marked that is chosen.

You could even let people select the position / size of the face and compare positions of those too.

The data that holds the position /size of the blur could be stored in XML along with the other data and only used if the country from which it is being viewed deemed it necessary.

If this was done by a third party, I wonder if you could sell it back to Google.

interesting bunch of links you got there Haochi!

> Also, that restaurant in the photo is really good! Greek
> Islands on Halsted, two thumbs up :)

Reminds me, why doesn't Google put links on top of their panorama photos pointing to the user reviews they already got stored in Google Maps?

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-06-19.html

Check this out:
http://googlestalker.wordpress.com
an entire blog devoted to chicago's street view.