The secret economics of Google Street View

The peg man has secrets. Starring @AtYourLeisure @chuppl @echozero_ @ThePresentPast_ @neoexplains
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[PhilEdwardsInc]

i know this is a video for street view/geoguessr lovers...but anything else you'd like to learn the secret economics of? i talked to a ton of people for this and it was pretty fun - would like to do it again.

[The_Sofa_King]

Google street view is one of the best things they have made. I can’t wait for them to shut it down in 3 years.

[joyfuflower]

I was in high school when they started capturing Google street view in my city and my friends and I would check basically every day to see who's house was added.

Being a North American suburb, we only really saw each other at school because we all lived so far from eachother, but after a while of looking at street view, we started to "drive" between our houses in google maps and we realized that it was doable by bike if we took certain paths and used certain intersections to cross major arterials.

So google street view is one of the main reasons we started hanging out at each other's places, which led to some of my fondest memories growing up.

If you're not from North America, you may not be able to grasp the isolation of the suburbs for kids who can't drive and weren't tall enough to see out of the window when being driven around, but it's so bad that most kids could not navigate outside of their neighborhood.

My closest friend lived a mile away in a maze of identical houses with deliberately obtuse connections that made the shortest path almost 3 miles. Very easy to get lost, and there's no business of any kind where you could call your parents. Add cars that drove at 40 down residential roads to this mix and you'll understand why even our parents didn't want us outside.

[StaticPA]

I've genuinely never looked down in streetview

[my.names.robb.with.two.bs]

I passed by a street view car 3 times in under an hour the other day. Pinned my locations and waiting for the data to upload to see what I look like. 😊

[VirtualTourPhotographer]

I'm surprised you didn't spend much time on what the largest economic reason for publishing to Street View. And that's as a virtual tour of businesses where the Street View virtual tour is part of their Google Business Profile (Google My Business). I've been doing this commercially since 2015 and the program has been around in various forms since 2011. It was good to see Frederico on there - he's part of that old crew, yet missing that element is like forgetting that the worlds 2nd largest search engine is YouTube.

Happy to chat with you about this if you're interested. There's surely room for a follow up.

Thanks for putting the time and effort into a great production too.

[ztl]

The people crave a Phil GeoGuessr stream

[jerome]

TIL Australians say bushwalking instead of hiking!

[Ze_Austin]

This is such a Phil Edwards™ topic

Love it

[watchingytkgn]

My favourite street view area to explore is Iqaluit in Nunavut, Canada; the bay freezes over in the winter and the temporary ice road across it has been documented for street view via dog sled!

[ryanwilson]

A couple years ago I found a photo sphere placed at the peak of Mt. Everest but it was just a capture of this kid's minecraft server asking you to join.

[Parakeet-pkdl]

I really wonder how you even come up with such topics 😁

[anglaismoyen]

It gives me bittersweet feelings when people contribute to Google's street view. Although it does enrich my life because it puts all of the imagery into one user-friendly platform, it's a huge opportunity cost for the free (libre) projects that you touched on. All of those wonderful volunteers who contribute map and imagery data might be helping other end-users, which is great, but they're also helping a massive multinational corporation make even more money, and the terms of use are very restrictive. If all of those people spend their energy on Mapillary, Kartaview, Panoramax and/or OSM, that would allow so much more free use and innovation. Not to dictate how anyone spends their time, but if you're going to work for free, shouldn't you at least work on a collaborative project?

[chasinglessandlessrainbows]

I don’t care what Phil has to say, I just watch his videos because I think he’s dreamy looking

[TheLordOfNothing]

I upload to Street View as a contributor with my 360º camera. I love it. I usually map places I go on vacation sometimes that don't have Street View or recent Street View and I did my local sidewalks over the summer.

One of the reasons I do it is also the historical aspect. A person 40 years from now might look at their grandparent's neighborhood and see what it looked like back then, or see new neighborhoods entirely.

[TheAmazingfulOne]

As a disabled autistic person, street view and these 360 photo views are crucial for me to know what to expect ahead of an event and prepaid accordingly. I used them to get the lay of the land of a music festival which had no streets but many little photo bubbles from over the years. I ❤ Google Street view!

[haugheymatt]

Phil you had me right up to 19:00 but lost me at Ms Johnson from Ripplebami helping technocrats to target landlords. I've spent years all over Africa and seeing this kind of power handed over to the governments is not at all benign, I'm sure Ms Johnson's company made some solid bank, but she should have realized just what was gong on when the reps from Gambia got so excited, it wasn't the prospect of bettering the lives of their citizens, it wasn't even the prospect of taxing those citizens, it was the buffet of bribery and extortion she had just presented them with. The people in countries of similar situation as Uganda have hid the ownership of their homes and properties for generations for good reasons. In Rawanda and Burundi families and clans were systematically hunted down just a couple decades ago using property records. And the tradition of bleeding a family dry once it becomes common knowledge they have property is a long one in countries that don't have staple and consistent courts and laws. To see Ripplebami making money on this makes it even worse.

[quincentupleyourmoney]

In the early 2010s I was dating a girl who lived in Saskatchewan while I lived in New Jersey. I drove up to spend two months there in the summer of 2011, and at some point the Google Street View car apparently drove by, cause my POS Camry with Jersey plates is in her driveway in Prince Albert, SK.

I assume that somewhere else in the province on Street View there's *probably* another Jersey plate, maybe on a semi or something, but I wouldn't be that surprised if I were the only passenger car with Jersey plates for hundreds of miles (or kilometers, as it were).

[Canadagraphs]

Great video. As a Geoguessr player, whose primary use of google maps is learning stuff for the game, I obviously loathe unofficial coverage, since it isnt featured in the official maps & often pops up occasionally on overwritten coverage, which can cause problems with the fact, as you pointed out, their camera quality is often poorer than googles. But seeing how its used to help businesses no one would ever know about, or first responders makes me loathe them a little less.

[glennaa]

It's a shame that Google killed off photospheres in their camera app