BingStreetside
Latest
Microsoft takes Bing Streetside offline in Germany, privacy complaints to blame
Germany is notoriously privacy-minded, and services like Facebook's Friend Finder and Google's Street View have come under scrutiny in the country's courts. The latest offender to raise Germany's ire is Bing Streetside, a Street View-style photo service. Microsoft took the feature offline in the country following complaints about how Streetside displays private homes. By default, houses are visible, though Microsoft conceals the images if users submit a complaint. Still, citizens were apparently unhappy with this process, which prompted the company to axe the service while it addresses those privacy concerns. There's always Street View if you need your fix of blurred-out Berlin buildings in the meantime.
Bing 2.0 brings better Facebook integration and the impressive Streetside to iPhone (video)
Microsoft just released -- or should we say, Apple just approved -- version 2.0 of the Bing search app for iOS devices. In addition to several other new features including integrated Facebook Likes on search results (really!?) and in-app checkins to Facebook and Foursquare, Bing now comes packing Streetside, something that first blew us away as Street Slide when it was still in the labs at Microsoft Research. Unlike Google's Streetview that requires a lot of forward- and back-clicking and turning in order to get a feel for a location, Streetslide provides a more comprehensive view of the shops and businesses in an area by letting you strafe down the sidewalk while zooming in and out of the buildings located on each side of the street. We took it for a brief spin (literally) and came away impressed. You won't find Streetside implemented for all locations yet (for example, San Francisco's Make-out Room was found on Streetside but the Slanted Door restaurant wasn't) but they do seem to have large swaths of major cities covered based on our brief testing of Chicago, Seattle, New York, and San Francisco. Sorry, nothing yet in London and Amsterdam but maybe you'll have better success searching your own neighborhoods. See the full list of what's new after the break in addition to a Streetside demo from Bing's architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas -- unfortunately, we're not seeing the impressive Panaroma feature he mentions in this release. Update: We've been told that Facebook Likes, like Panaroma, like totally didn't make it into the app release. It's a web search results feature only for the time being.
