April 4, 2008
One of the compelling things about Povo is that almost everything on the site knows its location and therefore its location relative to every other thing on Povo. This is one of two core difference between Povo and a regular wiki (the other being
search engines). Our standard map view provides a nice way of seeing how close things are to a given point, but there's nothing like seeing the street in pictures. Google recently allowed us to embed their Street View functionality into our listing pages, and about 2 days later we put it live. Now you’ll have the ability to "stand" on the street and take a look around before you ever actually go there. It’s a really great way to explore a neighborhood.
More importantly, you can make it better. Taking an address and showing you a picture of that thing (park, bodega, whatever) is not an exact science. If you give us
Masa on Tremont, there's no automatic way for us to know which "side" of that corner to show you. So, if you click "see street view" and it's not right there you can browse around a bit and then save that "better view" for everyone else's benefit. This is another way of combining people and technology to make things better for both.