The Google Maps' Street View service plays catch-up and implements a "PhotoSynth-like" service. This allows a user to navigate through a Street View panorama with geo-located photographs supplied by other users. The images have been active for a while but the navigation has only just been made public and was announced on Friday in the Google blog post, Navigate your way through user photos in Street View.

The new service is not a fully functional PhotoSynth service so you cannot jump between StreetView and an independent geo-located PhotoSynth (ie. photo assembly). Still, it works well with the panoramas in Google Maps' Street View service, and its operation is very smooth.

Most of the blog discussion concentrates on the fact that the main difference is that this uses Flash, and Bing Maps/PhotoSynth uses Silverlight which limits its accessibility on Linux systems. However I think the advantages/disadvantages might be opposite to the current online opinion. Silverlight is supported on Windows and Intel Mac systems. Take up is only 50% but that is after only about 18 months of Silverlight 2 and it is growing fast. It is supported on Linux systems using Moonlight although I do not know if Moonlight supports Bing Maps, and whether many Linux users would actually install it (those expressing an opinion on discussion blogs are usually declining Moonlight on ideological and not technological grounds). There is also the argument that desktop Linux is set to remain a tiny minority of installed systems for the foreseeable future. In contrast, Apple has a well-known dislike of Flash and many of their new systems (eg. the iPad) do not support it. Although Flash is a popular choice for new web mapping systems, there is a growing feeling that its days are numbered.