Google Adds Brazil World Cup Football Stadiums to Street View

Google Maps on Thursday began letting soccer fans dive into World Cup venues in Brazil without having to leave home.

The free online mapping service added "Street View" imagery of all 12 World Cup stadiums along with scenes captured on roads painted in festive tribute to the major global sporting event.

"Whether you're watching the games from the comfort of your couch or packing your bags for Brazil,Google Maps is your ticket to the World Cup," Street View program manager Deanna Yick said in a blog post.

"And if you're lucky enough to have a physical ticket to Brazil, don't forget to pack Google Maps for mobile."

Google mapping applications for smartphones or tablet computers include tools for finding the most efficient ways to get to games using buses or trains in host cities.

The service also features maps of the insides of stadiums, airports, malls and other spots soccer fans may want to explore, according to Yick.

Images from other potential locations of interest, such as Iguacu National Park and St. Michael of the Missions, were also added to Google Maps.

Google in April introduced a 'time travel' mode for Street View. Street View snapshots now include the option to see what neighbourhoods and landmarks looked like at different periods in the last seven years, as Google Inc. has been dispatching camera-toting cars to take street-level pictures for its maps.

The search giant said it intends to keep adding pictures to the digital time capsules as its photo-taking cars continue to cruise the same streets gathering updates.

Google Partners With Twitter to Include Tweets in Public Disaster Alerts

Google has announced that starting Tuesday, its Public Alerts service has begun incorporating tweets from disaster-struck locations.

Now, when the company issues a public disaster alert from official sources, such as the National Weather Service, it will include relevant tweets in Google Now, Search and Maps, as well as on its Public Alerts website.

The announcement came via a Google+ post from the Google Crisis Response team. Google made the Crisis Response page to make critical information more accessible in times of disaster.

"Starting today [June 3], you can find relevant data from Twitter on a subset of Google Public Alerts. We launched Public Alerts to provide updates from official sources, such as the National Weather Service, via Google Now, Search, and Google Maps. Now, some of the more extreme Public Alerts will include Tweets to help answer important questions: are schools closing? Are neighbours evacuating? What are people seeing on the front lines of a storm?" Google noted in its post.

The idea behind this is to have the public's tweets help answer questions in emergency situations. The feature is currently for English-speaking regions and only for Google's Public Alerts product. The company is also working towards adding "new kinds of social content to other products and geographies in the future."

Once partners in 2011, both companies has had issues in past. It seems that Google is leaving things behind and using Twitter's public API.

Although Twitter declined to comment on the news, but a Google spokesperson told Wired that the tweets are sourced via Twitter's public API and not the "firehose," or real-time data stream.