Do you think ‘Google Maps‘ is cool? If not, you need to check out the latest additions to the Google Maps, the Street View and the Mapplets. With the new mapping innovations, you can view an interactive panorama photo for certain addresses on Google Maps. The big announcement was made at the Where 2.0 conference. The announcement of Google’s street-level imagery has been made for five U.S. cities- Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. Microsoft is working on a similar effort, but looks like Google is the first to come out with the pioneering approach.

Users can now enjoy navigating within 360-degree street-level views of different cities in the States. The new street level mapping service has been rolled out as a result of partnership with a company called Immersive Media, whose vans are running across the cities to collect the photos. Google has also its own cars around the Bay Area for collecting the street level views. Let’s take an in-depth look at the Street Views and Mapplet.

Google’s Street View is part of the form’s further endeavors to develop a more affluent experience for its geo-web services. With the help of Street View, users are able to virtually walk through streets, buildings, restaurants, parks with well-off panoramic imagery. Users just need to type in the address as they do normally but they have the “street view” option atop the map results. There is an iconic orange man, which you can drag and drop to view the photos of a particular location. The pictures revealed are of high-quality and look alike the 360-degree photo snapshots. Although some pf the pictures for New York City and Las Vegas locations are a bit blurry but all the photos for San Francisco are of crisp quality. Interestingly, it won’t suck down your memory as done by more extensive mapping programs like Google Earth or the lately launched Microsoft Virtual Earth. The image above is of 352 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco.

Other than the Street View, Google also announced ‘Mapplets’ for Google Maps, which is basically widgets that can be displayed on Google Maps. The new service will allow the developers to create mini applications for Google Maps by working with codes and javascript to meet the geographic content requirement of a particular website. In more technical terms, Mapplets are mini-webpages that are served inside an IFrame within the Google Maps site. Mapplets can be found in the Mapplets directory.

Google is not the only one with such services. Microsoft has already been experimenting with street views since last year and has rolled out 3D maps for cities like NewYork via Microsoft Live Search Maps. The two internet giants are busy adding novel features to their Map applications available online constantly. While a Live Search Maps user can navigate through the New York streets in detailed 3-D map of the city, a Google Maps user can view actual 360 degree photographed images of addresses, thanks to Street View.

Once you have installed the Virtual Earth 3D, you can browse through the New York City, with all the buildings and views appearing more than realistic to the eyes. The 3D cityscapes have been added for many other cities too. Check out the full list. In an answer to the Google’s Street View, Microsoft also added a many locations around the world for their Birds Eye View coverage.

Google Earth service has remained most of the time in the news owing to the budding security concerns with relation to the screening of the security areas and some of the secret zones of the countries all over the world. Recently, Indian govt. asked Google to blur the Google Earth Maps. Earlier, Google agreed to the requests but now it seems that they won’t entertain the demands anymore as it is hampering the quality of the service. Google thinks that the blurry images make their users think that the quality of the service is deteriorating. I doubt that the Google Maps Street View service won’t raise the security concerns of the governments all around the world.

Leave the security issues aside, the most interesting thing to be seen is that would it be the Google’s Street View or the Microsoft’s 3D maps, which will steal the real charm. While Microsoft has expended a hell lot of man-hours and technology for creating the virtual world from the real one, Google has hired someone to get the photos of the desired location. Anyway, I am much more impressed by the Google’s street view than the Microsoft’s 3D Maps. Both the ‘map’ competitors, Google and Microsoft, are experimenting heavily in improving their mapping applications and the time will tell which system is honored more by the users.