Mapping what your neighborhood used to look like

In part of their initiative to get young and old people to hang out, We Are What We Do, in collaboration with Google, built Historypin. The map application invites people to upload their pictures and pin them in street view. The effort creates something of a digital time machine where old and young can find common ground.

Obviously, the more people who use it, the more useful it becomes. There doesn’t seem to be ton of pictures yet, so all you get is Google street view in a lot of places.

It’s easy to see the potential though. Just imagine being able to watch the evolution of your city, town, or neighborhood, like a block-specific museum with people’s personal stories and old photos with modern context.

[via infosthetics]

4 Comments

  • Sound great!
    But I see a future problem, what will happen when any person upload a noncontext photo?
    how can cotrol this? with a system than recognice the novelty of the pic?
    We can view only automatic focus photos? 2 persons shot different to the same place, because see in different form, have different interest.

    Sound great and easy to use, but in long time I think that it’s could be hard to manage in order to view different point of view of city.

  • More geo-mapped historical images content here…

    http://www.sepiatown.com

  • Thank you, I have tweeted it. There are no pictures of old Moscow :( but maybe later when more people will visit the web page, the pictures will appear.