Last night, Google released an update to its Street View system to include new locations across the UK, Netherlands and other European countries.

My home city, Portsmouth, is not on there yet but Southampton is so, clicking through my old university stomping ground I came across this little treat:

First shot: The Google Car may or may not have gone through the first red lights. Who knows… the lights ahead are already on amber.

Second shot: Lights are still on amber. Technically you should be preparing to stop

Third shot: They’re red. Is the driver still going? Watch the two cars in front – a white one and a dark blue one. Also, note the two schoolkids walking under the tunnel.

Fourth shot: The two cars ahead are further away – either they sped up or the driver is slowing down… maybe he stopped after all? Note the two kids are closer too, so it’s a continuous set of frames

Fifth shot: The two cars are well away now, already around the left-hand bend. There’s no reason to believe from this particular shot that it’s a few seconds after the last – the driver might’ve waited for a green and gone a bit later, right? Well, take a look for yourself at the car behind the driver, and the two schoolkids will still be there. In the distance, cars are starting to come towards our fearless driver…

Final shot: there are more schoolkids running under the bridge, and the oncoming cars are now having to wait for our Google Driver to get out of the way!

Conclusion: well, none really. This is a pointless, but mildly satisfying discovery. Enjoy.

Google’s 3D world viewer, Google Earth has been updated to version 5.

The headline feature is the ability to view historic satellite photos, as in this picture of Cherque Farm housing estate, near Lee on Solent, Hampshire, UK.

Housing estate nr. Lee on Solent, Hampshire UK

In the series of photos, ranging from 1999 (left) to 2007 you can clearly see the construction of the estate over time.

Apparantly the big news in the Westcountry is that the A303 is to be closed some time early next year, with a 40 mile diversion. The BBC has more details and the Highways Agency press release is also available.

I wondered why neither the HA nor any of the press articles I’d seen bothered publishing a map. While they’re happy to describe an elaborate route in text, it took me less than five minutes to knock this up.

The visual view is – I think – much more explanatory than any text, and it adds instant impact to the article.

Finally, I’m back into doing something that I love – fiddling with new ideas.

Today, Google released Google Gears 0.4 with geolocation. For those of you not yet aware of Google Gears, it’s an attempt by the big G to enhance the client-side with a variety of rich add-ons, such as local databases, offline services and smoother integration with the host OS.

Gears is also available for Windows Mobile devices and, with the addition of geolocation, adds some exciting spice to the mobile platform.

Previously I’ve made aborted attempts to use a combination of Navizon (a mobile tracking service), Fire Eagle (Yahoo!’s location “platform”) and iamnear.net (Tom Taylor‘s very handy directory of POIs). It works to a point, but is a hopelessly elongated way of serving geo-aware content from a web browser.

With Gears 0.4 it’s now possible for the browser to interrogate directly the user’s location, through a combination of cell IDs and GPS (where available). The natural conclusion is to slap this tool onto the front of something like iamnear.net, et voila, you have a location-aware website puling information directly from the client.

Without further ado, check out my painfully basic demo – you’ll need Windows Mobile 5/6 and Google Gears (if it is not detected, it’ll prompt you to install).

As a bonus, the site will also work on your desktop, but I’m presuming that’d only be available with a GPS dongle of some kind?

I’d love to spice it up a bit – actually without presuming too much I’m fairly sure this is a natural upgrade to iamnear.net and other sites… if you have any thoughts feel free to post below

Google Reader always was a little odd with its unread posts count – sometimes not updating its post count until I “did” something in Reader (e.g. refresh), but more recently over the last couple of days it’s been quite a way out. Is anybody else experiencing this?

All the refreshing in the world won’t clear those 3 “new” items, but a couple of minutes later (since starting this post) it’s all back to zero again.

This looks like a new addition. Google Maps’ Terrain View now has contour lines so you can see with better clarity which hills are steep and what the elevation is likely to be.

View Larger Map

Google’s new OpenSocial.org website is the front for the OpenSocial Foundation, an attempt to gather support for open development of OpenSocial-y issues such as data ownership and APIs.

Naturally, being the omnipotent creature that Google is, they’ve used their own Spreadsheet and newly-added survey feature to gather supporters (myself included).

Unfortunately, while the email address is hidden, it’s not gone completely. View the source of this page – a HTML output of the spreadsheet which appears on OpenSocial.org and behold: a listing of every email address submitted.

Fiddling with Google Spreadsheets, and came up with this estimation of what my life will look like (umm, certain estimates included…)

New API from Google allows you to create PNG charts from your data – very nice [via Google Operating System]

Google have just released Version 2 of their Google Maps Mobile, with the most obvious feature being the ability to locate the user even if they don’t have GPS – using the current Cell ID.

From the press release “[GPS technology] is supported on fewer than 15 percent of the mobile phones expected to be sold in 2007″

Go get it now, point your phone to google.com/gmm