Street View Update: 12 New Cities

About every two months, Google Maps adds 6-7 new cities to Street View. In May 2007 the service was launched with images for 5 cities, two months later 4 new cities were added, in October Google added 6 cities, while in December a record of 8 cities were added to Street View.

This month, Google added 12 new cities from the US: Juneau (Alaska), Boise (Idaho), Salt Lake City (Utah), San Antonio (Texas), Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Manchester (New Hampshire), Kansas City (Missouri), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Albany, Schenectady (New York). It's interesting to see that the 12 cities are distributed uniformly and the total number of cities is now 35.

When do you think Google will add all the important cities from the US and the rest of the world? Shouldn't Google outsource this job to other companies or at least accept photos from users and use technology like Photosynth to combine them?

Bonus question: can you find the formula for an integer sequence that has the first 5 values: 5, 4, 6, 8, 12?



{ via the unofficial Google Earth Blog. Updated with more information from Google LatLong. }