Google Street View
Google, struggling to keep up with Yahoo! and Live maps, recently released their street view feature. It’s probably nice for people in the very limited selection of featured cities, but I think they’re one step away from making it a nice feature instead of a novelty: digital removal of people and cars.
So far, I haven’t heard a single review of the usefulness of the street pictures; everyone’s just talking about people caught doing embarrassing things. But once Google takes a few passes with their van, they can combine the pictures from each pass and remove any unwanted clutter. Cars might be hard to get out of heavy traffic areas, but the sidewalks can be cleaned up. Then people might realize, “Hey, there’s a store behind that guy picking his nose”, and find that it can come in handy.