My friend and former colleague Eric just showed me the new A9 yellow pages technology. Besides a map it offers a view of the storefront. By clicking the according button one can walk up and down the street.
When we used to work for the Berlin based company Gate5, one of the products we developed was a feature rich yellow pages web application. The company actually survived even though our yellow pages application never made it to the market.
We did not have anybody driving trucks with GPS and cameras. Nevertheless our map was much nicer (rendered from two different databases, one for the streets and one for actual shapes of houses). In a playful prototype of a community tool which used the same technology, it was possible to leave notes attached to buildings so they were visible for buddies or the public. The application had a very advanced system of filters and I remember a concept we called “local hero” that would motivate users to contribute in order to get good ratings and thus increase the relevance of their posts (and get free SMS as incentives – SMS were pretty much the currency we used). One could call the idea location based blogging (for shop owners the thought of getting tagged that way is probably about as appealing as graffiti on their store front – “business model” wasn’t our strong side at the time). Despite a very stylish user interface, we never managed to make it as simple as non location based blogging.
After I stopped working for the company I continued using the map application which was still running on a publicly accessible development server for a year, before they remembered to turn it off. Maybe I would consider to start walking up and down if Amazon had the system going for any of the cities I hang out and shop in.