Google Earth [formerly Keyhole] now has high resolution imagery of my home town:

Murwillumbah High School, which I attended from 1985 to 1990. Not sure when this photo was taken.

It’s astounding how much of an improvement this is over the imagery available just seven months ago, when even Sydney was visible as only a few blurry pixels. Now I really can see my house:

Sydney, taken sometime within the last year, so I am probably under that white dot.

Of course, you could also use Google Earth to look at a place where you haven’t lived. Checking out Tokyo it’s amazing how much it looks like a screen shot from SimCity 3000 … and it’s also fascinating looking for the seams between photo sets, where images are collected from totally different angles, making buildings suddenly appear to lean in the wrong direction– See the top right of this image.

Google Earth is free, so if you’ve got a PC, go download it! Then try to resist the urge to email everyone you know with pictures of their houses…

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UPDATE: For some reason I thought that Google Maps and Google Earth were still using different databases, but checking again I realize that they are using the same imagery [Google Maps references kh.google.com for its images, so it's almost certainly using the KeyHole database]. Here is a link to a Google Maps view of that first image, and here is a satellite view of that strange elevated shed I posted about earlier.