A small Chinese mapping website has cloned Google’s Street View service and tailored it for China. Google hasn’t unleashed its Street View cars on the streets of mainland China, though it has in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
City8.com’s Roadview feature has trawled the streets of 41 of mainland China’s major cities, snapping the shops and homes on pretty much every road therein. It’s a huge effort and investment from a small, indie mapping and directory website that is not commonly used. It appears that in addition to getting revenue from ad clicks, City8 also sells its directory information to clients. Somewhat ironically, the site uses Google Maps.
The site’s implementation of Street View is not as smooth or quick as Google’s, but it works in a similar way, with a draggable pin to allow you to move around different parts of a city. Pictured above is the iconic gate to the Forbidden City in Beijing; below is the road beside the Bund, looking out over Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower:
From browsing around some familiar areas, it seems that the photos on City 8’s Roadview are about two to three years old. With China’s cities developing so quickly, that’s quite a long time, meaning that a number of new buildings will be missing from the feature.
Google hasn’t rolled-out their multi-camera Street View cars in mainland China – likely because they’d simply never get state approval to do so.
Despite Google’s many troubles in China – from their controversial shutdown of Google.cn, to the latest hack attacks on Gmail just last month – Google Maps remains China’s top mobile maps app in 2011, though it’s more and more under pressure from Autonavi, Nokia Ovi maps, as well as new map apps from Baidu and Tencent.
A hat-tip to Dutch entrepreneur Marc van der Chijs, who co-founded Tudou.com, for spotting this earlier today on his blog.
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