Google Maps Street View

Hi all,

Google maps (maps.google.com) has a brand new feature in some US cities (San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York... probably more, but these are the ones I've seen) called "street View". Basically, they drove a car around most of the streets in these cities with a massive camera rig on top, and they have a 360 degree image of the street taken every couple of metres (meters if you prefer :D ).

Now, I'm going to be visiting Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles next year, and I'm going to be using this feature to "walk through" the cities I'm going to be visiting. I was wondering if anyone could point out any interesting tiki places to look for from the street level?

I suspect it may even be possible to throw a filter of predefined tiki locations over google maps (the same ones used on critiki - I haven't checked).

anyhow, CHECK IT OUT! maps.google.com

I had a bit of fun playing with this yesterday -- it is very, very cool. There's not a lot of coverage yet; it will be outstanding once they get more cities in there. Miami is covered, but they stopped just short of the Mai Kai -- bah!

The best tiki sight you can see is at the corner of Post & Taylor in San Francisco -- zoom in and say hi to Tiki Bob, right from the comfort of your home.

Out front of the Kona Club on Piedmont in Oakland, you can see a woman taking a cig break. Out front of the Conga Lounge in Oakland, there's a woman chatting on her cell phone. Forbidden Island is on Alameda, which isn't covered. You can see the San Francisco Trader Vic's at 555 Golden Gate Ave, but it's pretty uninspiring. Ditto for the side entrance to the Tonga Room at the Fairmont. The Bamboo Hut is at 479 Broadway in SF, but it doesn't exactly look spectacular from the outside. Overall, it's the inside of all these places that shine, not the outside, but it's still fun to look.

Happy hunting!

On 2007-05-30 11:31, Humuhumu wrote:
Miami is covered, but they stopped just short of the Mai Kai -- bah!

Not any more! Here's the Google Maps link to the Mai-Kai

The Mai-Kai now not only gets a very good street level view:

But also, they get their own building icon, usually reserved for things like malls, airports, hospitals:

Now how cool is that!