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Earth Oddities Seen In Google Maps / Earth / Street View

It took me a while to see it as an indentation rather than a structure. Could be a watering hole. Its still interesting.
 
Great pics! Could the Alaskan one be part of an artefact of the photography, though? Either that or it's a landing pad. As with them all, it's difficult to make judgments without knowing the full story (or even half the story).

Not totally convinced by that "missile", I must admit.
 
gncxx said:
Not totally convinced by that "missile", I must admit.
Click to expand...
The 'missile' seemed one of the most ordinary ones to me!

(Presumably the military do test them from time to time.)

The Egyptian spiral fascinated me most - it's actually two spirals, one of pits, and one of mounds.

Near a coastal highway at the top of the Red Sea, near where the Gulf of Suez meets it (if that's of any relevence). It's about 350m across, N to S.
 
completely silly i know, but it kind of tickles me that when you run the mouse pointer over the zoom icon, the dutch title thing for it comes up 'inzoomen'(!)
 
Okay, not sure this really counts as "weird", but I thought it was funny.

I was googling the map around my hometown, checked out my own house (very cool, too bad they didn't get our award-winning Christmas decorations lol!), but my mom and I both laughed when we zoomed in on our next-door neighbor Martha's house--there she was at her newspaper box, cheerfully waving at the camera!! :lol:
 
Google Latitude

Google Latitude keeps tabs on friends' locations
February 4, 2009

With Google's new Latitude software, cell phone users can share their locations with others.

Story Highlights
New Google software, Latitude, lets cell phone users share their location with others
Google hopes it will help people find each other and keep track of loved ones
To protect privacy, Google specifically requires people to sign up for the service
People can share their precise location, the city they're in, or nothing at all


Just because the Internet has broken down geographic barriers, don't assume that Google doesn't care about geography.

The company plans to launch software called Latitude on Wednesday that lets mobile phone users share their location with close contacts. Google hopes it will help people find each other while out and about and to keep track of loved ones.

"What Google Latitude does is allow you to share that location with friends and family members, and likewise be able to see friends and family members' locations," said Steve Lee, product manager for Google Latitude. For example, a girlfriend could use it to see if her boyfriend has arrived at a restaurant and, if not, how far away he is.

To protect privacy, Google specifically requires people to sign up for the service. People can share their precise location, the city they're in, or nothing at all.

"What we found in testing is that the most common scenario is a symmetrical arrangement, where both people are sharing with each other," Lee said.

The software spotlights Google's fixation with mapping and location technology. Location is an important part of navigating the real world, and Google clearly sees its geographic services as a way to establish a more personal connection with customers who today use Google chiefly for the virtual realm of the Internet.

And of course money is involved, too: Google hopes its mapping technology will lead to location-based advertising revenue.

Google's power is firmly lodged in search and search advertising, but the company is trying to expand to broader online services, too. That includes online documents and various aspects of social networking, which are much more personal services and ones that put Google into more direct competition with rivals such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo. Like using Google profiles to contact information with select contacts, using Google Latitude tells Google who's who in your social graph.

How it works

Latitude is part of Google Maps for Mobile, the company's mapping software for mobile phones, but also can be used through a gadget loaded onto its iGoogle customized home page. It'll work in 27 countries at launch, Google said.

Initially, it will work on most color-screen BlackBerry phones, most phones with Windows Mobile 5.0 or later, and most Symbian-based devices such as Nokia smartphones. An update to the Google Android operating system now being distributed to the T-Mobile G1 phone also enables it, and iPhone and iPod Touch users will get the option "very soon," Lee said.

Latitude uses Google's technology to judge a user's location not just by GPS satellite, but also by proximity to mobile phone towers and wireless networks.

That's a much more automated approach than the manual "check-in" process used by Dodgeball, a service that Google decided in January to shut down.

Other competitors exist, though. BrightKite and Loopt offer mechanisms for people to find each other by mobile phone, for example. Then there's MobiFriends, Tripit, and Dopplr.

And Google's clearest competitor, Yahoo, offers some competition with Fire Eagle. That service doesn't provide location information, but it does provide a mechanism to centralize people's geographic privacy choices, in effect taking care of some of the social graph management when it comes to location information.

To use the service, you need a Google account to record who has permission to see your location. For choosing who gets to see your location, you can use contacts stored with Gmail or Picasa, Google said.

The white lie

With the service, you can hide from specific people or disappear altogether. And you can manually set a specific location if, for example, your phone can't show it with sufficient precision or if you wish to tell someone a white lie about whether you really aren't going to go to the candy store.

Google envisions two broad classes of people with whom you might want to share location information. First is a small, close-knit circle of friends and family with whom you're willing to share your exact spot. Second is a larger group with whom you're happy to share city-level detail, convenient for finding out when somebody's in town but not much more.

When somebody is close, the software lets you contact the person various ways--by calling or sending an e-mail or text message, for example. It also lets you hide from that specific person.

Privacy is of course a significant concern when it comes to sharing this sort of information. If you want to use Latitude, you must specifically enable the service.

Meeting your pals at a bar is an obvious example of the software's possibilities, but there are softer cases I see as useful, too.

Lee pointed to a case where a friend's girlfriend, though far away in Seattle, will "virtually place herself next to him." That sounds a little sappy for my tastes, but I can still relate. My wife is on the other side of the country right now, and it would be heart-warming to see just where.

There are a lot of occasions where technology is better for maintaining relationships than it is for establishing them, and this looks like one to me.
Click to expand...

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/04/google.latitude/index.html
 
ah sorry, didn't realise my flash blocker was stopping the interesting bit of that from coming up!

this is rather odd... anyone want to make a guess at what's going on there?

Floating Road
 
Not sure what you mean. confused
Click to expand...

I think they must have fixed this since yesterday.

Looked like some sort of referencing error, there was a curved floating object, vaguely reminiscent of a security mirror, but the surface of it was a piece of road surface.

It was coming up repeatably yesterday, but not today.
 
There is a certain amount of blurring and distortion in those pictures, caused by the fisheye lens and by movement. Also, the method they have used for creating a 360-degree panorama may lead to some strange distortions.
 
well first they travel millions of miles through space as pods, and then they land and take root and the next thing you know... :lol: ;)

google seem to have started yanking a bunch of stuff. there's a single view in my street that is 'no longer available', and a whole chunk of slade road in birmingham (where i got a really cool link to a guy peeing in public) has gone too.
 
Mystery of Argleton, the 'Google' town that only exists online
Argleton, a 'phantom town' in Lancashire that appears on Google Maps and online directories but doesn't actually exist, has puzzled internet experts.
By Rebecca Lefort
Published: 6:00PM GMT 31 Oct 2009

The town appears on Google Maps in the middle of fields close to the M58 motorway, just south of Ormskirk.

Its 'presence' means that online businesses that use data from the software have detected it and automatically treated it as a real town in the L39 postcode area.

An internet search for the town now brings up a series of home, job and dating listings for people and places "in Argleton", as well as websites which help people find its nearest chiropractor and even plan jogging or hiking routes through it. The businesses, people and services listed are real, but are actually based elsewhere in the same postcode area.

Google and the company that supplies its mapping data are unable to explain the presence of the phantom town and are investigating.

Tantalisingly, “Argle” echoes the word “Google”, while the phantom town’s name is also an anagram of “Not Real G”, and “Not Large”. [Oi, Whitehead, is this your doing! :twisted: ]

One theory is that Argleton could have been deliberately added, as a trap to catch companies that violate the map's copyright.

So-called "trap streets" are often inserted by cartographers but are, as their name suggests, usually far more minor and indiscreet that bogus towns.

Roy Bayfield, head of corporate marketing at what would be Argleton's closest university, Edge Hill, in Ormskirk, was so intrigued by the mystery that he walked to the where the internet indicated was the centre of Argleton to check that there was definitely nothing there.

"A colleague of mine spotted the anomaly on Google Maps, and I thought 'I've got to go there'," he said.

"I started to weave this amazing fantasy about the place, an alternative universe, a Narnia-like world. I was really fascinated by the appearance of a non-existent place that the internet had the power to make real and give a semi-existence."

When Mr Bayfield reached Argleton – which appears on Google Maps between Aughton and Aughton Park – he found just acres of green, empty fields.

Joe Moran, an academic at Liverpool John Moores University and map expert, said: "It could be a deliberate error so people can't copy maps. Sometimes they put in fictional streets as the errors would prove they were stolen. I haven't heard of it before on Google Maps."

A spokesman for Google said: "While the vast majority of this information is correct there are occasional errors. We're constantly working to improve the quality and accuracy of the information available in Google Maps and appreciate our users' feedback in helping us do so. People can report an issue to the data provider directly and this will be updated at a later date."

The data for the programme was provided by Dutch company Tele Atlas. A spokesman said it would now wipe the non-existent town from the map.

He added: "Mistakes like this are not common, and I really can't explain why these anomalies get into our database."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/g ... nline.html
 
Obviously it exists in a parallel universe, I did notice it disappears if you zoom in too far.
 
I've just checked.....it's still there!

EDIT: Looks like me and Ronson checked at the same time!
 
Not surprising, the maps for my area haven't been updated for the last four years.
 
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