Google Video sucks for promiscuous hot babes making out but I happily ran across these keepers. Turn the volume up!

*wiping drool from mouth*

edited: Looks like Google took them down. Dammit!

Now this is just effin’ kewl. At the Where 2.0 Conference today Google released an exciting new feature called Google Maps Street View that’s “wow’d” the tech industry. It’s a feature that Microsoft and Amazon A9 have beta’d and let slide off the face of the planet without any further updates or attention. Well, what’s a loss to them is a gain for Google. They took the idea and applied a better user interface that makes it blend well with the existing Google Maps. The new feature makes you want to literally “walk” the streets of San Francisco and Las Vegas.

Street View takes the existing technology to a whole new level. Smooth transitioning 3D panorama views with high quality photos that you can zoom into and drag around. Really neat. I seriously wish San Diego was on the list of cities like San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Denver, and Miami but like Google Transit we’ll just have to wait a year or two. Dammit!

Anyways, the new feature opens up a whole new world to peeps like me. For the next few hours I’ll probably walk the streets of San Francisco and New York looking for funny and weird shots that Google accidentally photographed. Try these for instance:

Need some money?
She’s got legs and she knows how to use them.
Hot babes direct to you.
Oh, it’s definitely a thong!
Attack of the clones.

If you’re outside the U.S., click this: http://maps.google.com/?&gl=us and search for one of the listed cities above.

[Via: Google Earth Blog, Techcrunch, and Google Maps Mania]

I know I haven’t been blogging much. It’s been a combination of a lot of things. Just today though Google released a pretty useful tool called Voice Local Search. Why is it cool? Well, let me explain.

First off it’s free. Now you can’t beat that. Second, it’s free. Okay, okay I can see you get the point. This tool is sweet because there’s no interaction with your phone number pad which is already out-tasked with letters, numbers, quick dial, and whatever other functions you assign to them. Now if you decide on having Domino’s pizza in your area and don’t know the number, all you have to do is call up: 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone, provide information to the automated voice operator, and let Google Local Voice Search connect you. This is just so effin’ kewl to me. No more dialing 411 and being charged $2.50 per call or even having to dial FREE-411. FREE-411 was great but you had to listen to a 20 second advertisement before you could continue. The first few times I used this service it was great but later became annoying.

The other kewl fact about the service is the choice to have an SMS text message with all the business information sent to you if you can’t remember what was just told to you.

They even provide a small Cheat Sheet to print out if you can’t remember some of the commands here which reads this:

When you are asked for city and state, you can:

• say the city and state like “beverly hills california”.
• say the zip, e.g. “nine-oh-two-one-oh”.
• type the zip code using the key pad, e.g. “9-0-2-1-0″.

When you are asked for a business name or category, you can:

• say a business name, like “Giovanni’s pizzeria”.
• say a category name, like “hardware stores”.
• say “go back” to change city and state.

When browsing through results, you can:

• say the listing number (e.g. “number two”) or press the corresponding key (e.g. “2″) to choose a listing or navigate between results.
• say “text message” or press “9″ to receive a text message, when you are calling from a mobile phone.
• say “details” to get more information about the current listing.
• say “start over” or press “*” to start from the main menu.
• say “go back” to change business or category.

So give it a try. This along with Google Maps Mobile will kill Yellow Pages in the near future. I personally don’t even own a Yellow or White Pages anymore. Cell phone numbers aren’t listed in White Pages so what’s the use.

Here’s an ongoing thread on Google Blogoscoped with some good insight into the new product:

http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/91387.html

Just when you think Google Reader couldn’t get any better… well, if they will ever come out with search for Reader. The other small feature that a lot of folks were requesting was a better way to recall the large list of shortcuts for Google Reader. Now that I’m thinking about it, I did many times have to search for the list of shortcuts in their help section which became a little cumbersome over time. So to give the people what they wanted, the Google Reader Team added another shortcut (shift+/) or just (?) which now brings up another transparent window with all the shortcuts like below:

After the transparent window is up you’re also able to click on a link “Open in a new window” to bring up a pop-up window and leave it next to reader while you work. Pretty damn good idea.

They’re constantly coming out with practical features as this that blow away the competition. It’s still killing me though not being able to search within my feeds. Oh well…. *crosses fingers and waits*

I bet there are a lot of people out there who scour Google Maps and Google Earth constantly looking for kewl shit.

A few years back satellite imagery use to be something that only large companies who forked over thousands of dollars for only a couple thousand miles of coverage. Now it’s all free for public use. I love technology.

Google Maps

via: digg

And some of the comments are effin’ funny….

Yes, I’m a news addict and a little bit of a speed reader. If you take a close look at the stats you’ll notice that I subscribe to a few photo sites. So I wouldn’t really count those. I’m a sucker for charts…..

(thanks Google Reader team)

From your 171 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 16,054 items, starred 49 items, and shared 29 items.

Click to enlarge

Related Link’age

Any time I find something useful that could benefit another I’ll usually put a little post together and throw it on the ole’ blog. All my friends know I follow Google’s products pretty closely. It’s interesting to watch a company as Google branch out into areas that have been monopolized by other companies who are dedicated to solely doing one job which from this post title would be PayPal. Not too long ago I used to have an electronics store on eBay and I used PayPal for every single transaction. Well, it did its job of processing transactions for Paypal to Paypal, credit, and debit. The only problem was the cost. I was charged a fee for the eBay store, hosting the individual product, and finally the PayPal transaction charge. I had to jack the price up to stay alive. I later closed it down because I wasn’t making enough off of a sale to make a monetary difference that outweighed the trouble I went through playing customer service with shoppers/buyers.

This season we have Google Checkout. Too bad they’re not allowed as a form of payment on eBay. I might actually re-open the store if that was the case. Gcheckout is advertising their product by offering some big incentives for both retailers and shoppers. They’re trying to quickly take market share from big players like Paypal by using their arsenal of hired super geek engineers and their deep pockets. Retailers don’t have to pay for any transaction fees through the rest of this year and even 2007. Now that’s sick. If I had an online store I would definitely jump on that. A lot already have.

Since I’m no longer a retailer I now fall into the consumer category. For us that means spending that hard earned cash on holiday gifts this Christmas. Things don’t have to seem grim though especially when looking for discounts shopping online. Gcheckout to the rescue. From their blog post:

And this holiday season it also means a nice bonus for your gift-buying budget; as a small holiday gift to all Checkout shoppers, you’ll receive $10 off purchases of $30 or more, or $20 off purchases of $50 or more, depending on the merchant.

If you think about it, that’s possibly some serious cash saved. I use Gcheckout every time I shop at Starbucks. I buy $31 of coffee and after the $10 discount from Google it’s like receiving a free pound of coffee. I’ve made 3 buys from Starbucks using Gcheckout and everytime has been smooth as can be. I didn’t have to register at the retailer site and give out my info… even though they eventually receive my name and address, but not my full credit card number. Heck, all I had to do was log into my Google Account to buy. So when you’re at the site’s shopping cart all you have to do is click on the Google Checkout icon and it brings you to another shopping cart with the same items hosted on Google’s servers. As you can see below (Click on the image to enlarge). Next put in your password and click “Place your order now.” Fast and simple.

So if you were to buy something or somethings that totaled just over $50 from for instance Buy.com then that’s almost a 40% discount. Not too shabby if you ask me.

P.S. Yes, I know I have been blogging a lot about Google lately but the news is so damn juicy…. I can’t resist.