I thought the folk here might be interested in a couple of 'Googly' things I'm working in my spare time...

First off, http://streetviewr.com – YAGSVAS (Yet Another Google Street View Aggregation Site) – although, to be fair, mine *was* first :) – the difference with this one is that I embed the Street Views into the page directly – no need to shuffle off to Google – feels much snappier..

The other thing is using the Street Views directly within my 3D browser framework (http://ubrowser.com) – I render the Street View to OpenGL and throw it on a polygon – I'm not exactly sure where to go with this but it seems like it could be useful. Maybe. – perhaps some kind of mashup with Google Earth.. Some demo pics here:

http://streetviewr.com/images/streetview_ubrowser_1.jpg

http://streetviewr.com/images/streetview_ubrowser_2.jpg

http://streetviewr.com/images/streetview_ubrowser_3.jpg

--Cal.

I have trouble seeing the use :)

>"although, to be fair, mine *was* first"
What is your website? Because Streetviewr has been created only a couple of hours after the launch of "Street views", and I sent all my discoveries to this site.

mine is streetviewr – hi tom :)

Do you directly grab the panorama photos from the Google server? If so it might be interesting to know how you did it...

LOL I didn't recognize your name
shame on me! shame on me! shame on me!!!

Philipp asked a good question, I think Callum grab quickly images just as
http://cbk0.google.com/cbk?output=tile&panoid=0x808580c17e703dd1&zoom=2&x=3&y=0
But for the flash... I do not know

There is a Web service you call you convert the lat/long from the original url into a panoid here:

http://maps.google.com/cbk?output=xml&ll=$lat,$long

That returns a fragment of XML that includes the panoid, yaw and zoom along with links to other views – these match the clickable locations when you're navigating normally.

Now that you have the panoid and the yaw/zoom, you pass them into the Flash application in the usual fashion – you can see the format in the output of the page I generate when you open an embedded link.

From Tom's link, it looks like you can also ask for an image directly – that might be easier way to capture the thumbnails than rendering the Flash movie with uBrowser and writing the output to a file (although you would lose the overlay and the image wouldn't match the view exactly).