Jared W. Smith

Google Maps apparently launched Street View in a bunch of new places, including South Carolina. People are having a lot of fun with Street View, and rightfully so. It’s really awesome, if not a tad outdated: the Street View of parts of the College of Charleston campus, for instance, shows a parking lot that has been a construction site for the last year and a half.

Here’s my last downtown apartment — this one is within the last year or so, as those cars are my old roommates’. I can’t get my first downtown apartment — they didn’t get onto all of the side streets downtown with the Street View car, apparently. It’s still neat, though — it’s fun to try to guess the dates on these things. It’s also fun to chase the USF truck down Calhoun Street.

All in all, it’s fun when we get cool stuff like this because it usually takes a while. :) What do you think of Street View?

Apparently some former Google folk decided they could do search better. Enter Cuil, which is becoming a synonym for fail.

UPDATE(S):

• Cuil does a number on Patrick’s iFroggy Network.
• Someone, erm, sidestepped the Wikipedia neutrality guidelines in the Cuil article.
• I’m quoted in Veronica Belmont’s analysis of Cuil.
• The Girl Riot also points to my LinkedIn fail as an example of Cuil fail.
• To be fair, things are improving a little bit, as I’m getting some more reliable results now. The “About Cuil” page no longer 404s, too. It still has a ways to go, and a lot of work to do both technically and in PR to overcome this absolutely terrible first impression.

Also, if you find this story worthy, please give it an ol’ Digg. :)

Was browsing through the City Paper’s excellent blog and caught this potentially amazing news for tech in the Charleston area — could it be? Could Google expand into Goose Creek? That’d sure be a great alternative to the current stable (or lack thereof) of jobs that a computer science student wishing to stay in the area could take…