I’m not sure how old this fea­ture is in Google Maps, but it is cer­tainly new to me. On top of that, It’s got to be one of the coolest imple­men­ta­tions I’ve ever seen.

The new fea­ture is called Street View. Basi­cally, cer­tain streets are high­lighted in blue. When you click on a loca­tion, a street-​level pho­to­graph pops up show­ing what the place actu­ally looks like.

As if that fea­ture wasn’t cool enough, you can also rotate, zoom and pan on the pho­tographs. Also, they are over­laid with street names and direc­tions. You can now effec­tively ‘drive’ through cities on Google Maps.

So far it looks like Google has only imple­mented this fea­ture for a couple of major US cities: San Fran­cisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami and New York City. Unfor­tu­nately, no Boston yet.

I am cer­ti­fi­ably a map junkie. I love star­ing at them. I’ve def­i­nitely got a 4’x4’ map of the greater Boston area in my office. So, basi­cally, I’m very excited about this new Street View business.

Since there is no street view of Boston, I checked out San Fran­cisco, where I recently visited.

Look, here’s a random coffee shop I went to. My Mom and sister were grumpy at me because I made them walk up a bunch of hills that day.

• Duboce Ave, San Fran­cisco

There was also this really neat sculp­ture that I passed on the T. I wanted to take a pic­ture of it for my friend Nico because it reminded me of one that she did. Unfor­tu­nately, I couldn’t get a pic­ture that looked like any­thing rec­og­niz­able. So Nico, here it is:

• Embar­cadero Plaza, San Fran­cisco

Via Kottke.