Google Street View – another tool for digital pr?

The Twitter conversation around Google Street View seems to fall into two groups. Divisions occur between the “how dare they do this to me, it’s just another nail in the coffin for personal freedom” and the “I love it and can’t stop using it” crowd.

Now, we work in the digital pr industry, so it could be said that we’re not representative of everyday web users, but we LOVE Google Street View and think everyone else should too. What is surprising is that conversation on Twitter is so divided, surely Twitter users are early adopters of new technology and happy to share information, disseminating it to a large audience? Well, seemingly not all of them. Happy to share what they are wearing, where they are going and what car they will be driving, some Twitter users don’t want us to see what their final destination might have been!

That rant out of the way, I have been thinking about the potential uses of Google Street View for digital pr and have come to the conclusion that there probably aren’t too many. Perhaps the tourism/leisure industry might be able to use images of cities to tempt holidaymakers? Or the property market to enable customers to explore potential areas? But, in digital pr, we’ll probably just use it to explore and have some fun. What do you think?

With all the other Google products out there that help us do our day job, we’ll stick to the analytics, keyword and search sites and just say thank you Google for yet another toy to play with.