Where were you when Google came through?

The Google cameras capturing “street view” images of Westmeath came to the area in the run-up to last year’s elections, and found a county full of political posters bunting - and wheelie bins.There’s been great excitement since Friday when “street view” went live for Ireland, the 25th country photographed by Google’s 360 degree cameras, and in general, Westmeath looks pretty good, thanks to glorious weather when most of the filming was done, and the luxuriant greens of the high-summer foliage.Nationally, 51,000 miles of road have been driven by Google to collect imagery for Street View Ireland. Street View only contains imagery that is already visible from public roads and photographs are taken at a point in time and are not live images.It appears a lot of the filming happened on bin days though: vast swathes of the county have black, blue, green or luridly pink wheelie bins adding a dubiously colourful touch to the area around the front gate.Strangely, in line with their policy of blurring faces of people snapped by their cameras, Google has also blurred the faces of the politicians on the political posters - but left their names visible.There have been concerns raised in other countries about the possibility of invasion of privacy, so Google has also blurred car registration numbers.Now that the application has gone live for Ireland, there are hours of fun ahead for anyone with a good internet connection, and spare time on their hands, as Street View offers them the opportunity to visit all sorts of locations: their old home, the place they went to school, their boss’s house, their ex’s house... all without leaving their desk. Many others will have fun spotting people they know - even if the faces are blurred!It should, however, also be very useful: giving directions to visitors, it will now be possible to send them screenshots showing significant landmarks around the way; if you’re checking out properties for sale, no longer will you have to rely on the smal pictures provided online by the auctioneers, you can now look at the house “in context”, seeing the neighbourhood in which it’s located, and having a look at the facilities and amenities nearby.For natives of this area living abroad - especially those who haven’t been back for a long time - Google Street View will let them see Ireland looks now, and it certainly looks well. There’s certainly enough scenery to entice tourists.There are some quirks in the system: a trip up Mary Street in Mullingar towards the Cathedral gives the impression of a Sunday afternoon stroll - but at the Cathedral, filming was clearly done on a different day, and there’s the bustle and hustle of weekday life.“Visitors” to Ballymore on the application, will find it difficult to make their way the length of the village’s long main street, as Street View keeps doing loops into and back into some housing estates along the way.There’s a similar scenario along portions of Mullingar’s C-Link road.Once you master the navigation - which doesn’t take long - you have the ideal toy not just for yourself, but for the kids in the family too.