A9 street level photo maps are gone!
I’m moving in February, and hopefully to the West End, so yesterday, I took advantage of the beautiful, atypically rain-free fall weather and took a stroll down Robson then up (er, down - my sense of direction in Vancouver has never been skewed) Denman. Man, am I ever excited to be moving there - what a gorgeous little part of town. SO MANY SHOE STORES on Robson, Cupcakes on Denman, millions of Greek restaurants…but I digress.
As I strolled, I marked up a Google Map I’d printed out with annotations for amenities like banks, libraries, green grocers, liquor stores, etc. Doing this survey of the neighbourhood got me to thinking, “I wonder when A9 will get around to doing street-level photo-mapping in Vancouver?”
It’d been a while since I used the A9 maps–I think I last used it to check out the convention centre before heading out to Baltimore, which was back in June–but when I tried to go to the site, I discovered it’s gone. The service, which had only been available since January 2005, was discontinued on September 29th, 2006, as part of a series of service cut-backs. The service was fabulous: you could take a virtual tour of a city at street level, as if you were walking around, instead of being limited to an aerial view.
It was reported several places, all of which I managed to miss. According to the folks at ResourceShelf, Windows Live Local is working on the same type of service, but so far only SF and Seattle are mapped. A9 Maps had quite a selection of major cities’ downtown areas, which makes me wonder what they did with all that data–has it been sold or will it be reused at some point? Is there anyone else providing a similar service?
November 24th, 2006 at 11:42 am
I like Mapquest feature of “Find nearby.” I can find gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores. I know it’s an map view and not the same as street level. But I love it…for when I move too!