City History Website with Google Street View

May 28, 2010 - PRLog -- Berlin, May 28, 2010. Google Street View allows users to walk the streets of a city from the comfort of their own homes. Street View images are three-dimensional and allow for interactive viewing. Using a mouse the user can move his perspective within the picture, up or down, forwards and backwards. It’s almost as if being there in person.

Street View is hailed as one of the most innovative services on the net and can be integrated into websites. The city history and blogging site time-o-rama.com makes use of this service. time-o-rama.com collects and compiles historical data on houses, streets and places. Users can upload photos, sounds and other files, write texts about experiences in a particular house or street and link this data with geographic coordinates. If someone searches for a specific term such as “Nikolaikirche” (Nikolai Church), the website will show uploaded photos, texts as well as an interactive timeline containing all events users have linked to this address.

Now, time-o-rama.com adds even more value to its site by adding a Google Street View panorama to each individual address. Thereby, even today, users can walk through many places and add their personal experiences - whether it’s Copenhagen, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, London, Zurich, Rome or Prague. Even an entry made by time-o-rama.com site operator Peter Debik on the Overlanders Steakhouse in Springfield, Australia has been fitted with a Street View Panorama.

However, Debik criticizes that “Only in Germany and Austria, the press and data protectors deprive the public of these new possibilities. Due to exaggerated fear-mongering our country loses ground when compared with international standards. In the future we have no right to complain when it becomes obvious that other countries have the upper hand, because we were not ready to adopt innovations in years prior.”

Debik considers the Street View debate stirred up by Hamburg’s data protection officer Prof. Johannes Caspar unnecessary: “Using headlines like ‘Peeking in your Bedroom’ the press and data protectors suggest to the German public that Street View would look into their private lives. But when viewing Street View images from other countries, it becomes obvious that people’s privacy is not violated. Faces are made unrecognizable, license plates removed and Street View images become fuzzy when zoomed in on, making it impossible to see any details.” Google itself stated that whenever people saw Street View with their own eyes, they were excited about the project.

time-o-rama.com shares that viewpoint and offers Street View panoramas despite the German debate. German critics also bemoan the fact that Street View is used as an advertizing platform. Occasional third-party ads in Street View panoramas are no problem for time-o-rama.com, however. On the contrary, says site operator Peter Debik. “If a company invests a lot of time, effort and knowledge into creating a fascinating, popular and free service, there should be a pay-off. Effort should be rewarded. This is well understood in other countries, but in Germany we would much rather increase spending on social services instead of helping companies, which would use new ideas to create new jobs. A German TV program yesterday criticized the fact that Hamburg’s data protection agency only has 20 employees vs 20,000 employees at Google. It would be wiser to ask how Google managed to create 20,000 jobs, providing monthly income to 20,000 people and why Germany seems to be unable to create that kind of success. Instead, we focus on inflating our data protection agencies.”

time-o-rama.com is available in German and English and already recruits half of its visitors from foreign countries. The website offers many types of adjustments for privacy settings. For example, every upload can be made public or private. time-o-rama.com membership is free and without obligation.

Bitpalast GmbH
Sensburger Allee 27
D-14055 Berlin
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US phone (608) 545-2115
Phone +49 30 32 70 18 92
Fax +49 30 32 70 18 91
press@time-o-rama.com
www.time-o-rama.com

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About time-o-rama.com:
time-o-rama.com gathers stories and photos of then & now. Everyone can contribute her own experiences and photos of her life or chronicle to the collection and read about and see what happened in a certain house at a certain time. If other users have already uploaded photos with an address relating to an event a user is recording, she can use these photos to illustrate her time-o-rama or chronicle.

Printable screenshots:
http://server483.time-o-rama.com/press.php?view=2