Don’t you love it when you talk about two sep­a­rate things and then some­thing hap­pens that forces an unex­pected con­ver­gence of the two? Ear­lier I was doing some Google Street View sight­see­ing of celebrity gar­dens. And I’ve posted a few notes (1 2) and pho­tos from my recent Yel­low­stone trip.

Thanks go to Peter, who the other day pointed out that Google now has added ten parks and recre­ation areas to Street View, includ­ing Yel­low­stone! So you want to see what the view is along Yellowstone’s Fire­hole Lake Drive? Just drop into Street View to find out. Of course, like all things vir­tual, it lacks some­thing of the actual. How will you smell the lodge­pole pines or get a whiff of the sul­fur fumes ris­ing from the springs?


While Street View is a great tool and can let you get a low-res look at places you’d never visit, it’s really just a pre­sen­ta­tion tool for canned pho­tog­ra­phy. The views are updated peri­od­i­cally, yes, but the peri­ods span many months. What you’re look­ing at today is soooo yes­ter­day, and in some ways it feels so Web 1.0.

Web cams offer a com­ple­ment to Street View and can pro­vide an imme­di­acy the for­mer tool lacks. In fact, if you’re inter­ested in the Old Faith­ful Geyser and Upper Geyser Basin at Yel­low­stone, there’s a recently installed web cam at the attrac­tion, with images updated at inter­vals of less than a minute.

Street View does a nice job of con­quer­ing space, giv­ing you the free­dom to move around a map and see what there is to see from dif­fer­ent loca­tions, and web cams can con­quer time by giv­ing you almost-immediate, up-to-date views of things as they’re happening.

What’s the next killer app? What will con­quer both space and time?

Will all cars have cam­eras and GPS installed and then have the images beamed to some cen­tral loca­tion for real-time descrip­tions avail­able to any­one on the web so that you can see what things look like right now? And if that hap­pens, who will be the cen­tral loca­tion serv­ing up the images? Google? The Depart­ment of Home­land Security?