Google Maps goes photographic

Yesterday Google quietly added another weapon to its growing arsenal: satellite photography in Google Maps. Images from DigitalGlobe and Earthsat now cover the United States and Canada, allowing anyone with internet to play amateur spy from the comfort of their desk.

And naturally, the first thing you do with technology capable of photographing an entire continent from space is look for places you already know.

There’s the rusty span of the Golden Gate bridge. The French Quarter of New Orleans. Boston’s North End, still bearing the scars of the Big Dig. Manhattan, looking strangely manageable from several thousand feet above. Even Winnipeg is there, presumably relieved to have made the cut.

The photographs are flat, silent and oddly hypnotic. Tall buildings become little more than rectangles unless you look at their shadows, which offer the only real clue that these things actually rise from the ground. The Washington Monument is a particularly good example: an enormous stone needle reduced to a thin grey mark and its elongated shadow.

What to look for.

Washington D.C. also provides one of the more interesting details. The area around the Capitol appears blurred, available only at considerably lower resolution than the surrounding city. Perhaps someone at Homeland Security decided that terrorists equipped with Google Maps would otherwise have access to dangerously sophisticated intelligence.

Of course, anyone genuinely interested in the exact dimensions of the Capitol could probably find them in a library, an encyclopedia, an architectural drawing or simply somewhere else on the Internet.

Still, there’s something strangely compelling about all this. Yesterday a map was lines, streets and place names. Today you can float above Manhattan, New Orleans or some anonymous suburban backyard like a low-budget intelligence agency. And this is probably only the beginning.

Update: The Capitol is no longer blurred, and satellite coverage has expanded to several major European cities.