DC is admirably accurate. Was expecting big splotch over the WH. Though the data gaps are odd. Plenty of detail for East Nashville, but not downtown.

The zoom out is amazing. And though just gimmicky, full pan and rotate with location names staying stationary is also great fun.

I give it another four hours before I decide I absolutely have to have a Pro account (hey, last night I was thing about buying ArcGIS just so I could see a baseline map of Manhattan, so it's a good deal, relatively speaking -- and yes, I know I'm crazy).

I just downloaded onto the work PC and for people like me, map freaks, this is potentially the biggest productivity destroyer since the advent of the internet. It is simply jawdroppingly gorgeous. I've been floating around the backwaters of Sweden, and the amount and detail of the information is breathtaking.

I feel like I have a few precious months left before the Mac version hits and I just resign myself to playing with Google Earth.

Deeply, deeply nifty.

Neither the desktop at home nor the one here at work has the videocard brainpower to run this badboy. Extremely frustrating.

Although I will say that one of the best purchases I made was a couple of years ago I picked up National Geographic's library of fold-out maps on CDROM. Now there's an outfit who knows how to make maps. Beautiful. The only annoying part is that the software is proprietary, so I can't figure out how to transfer all the info onto my hard drive...

Heh.

I was about to lambaste all you so-called early adapters for never hearing about Keyhole, which was doing all this 7 months ago. But then I saw the Google empire had simply taken them over to spread the joy of global zooming to the masses.