I joined twitter over a year ago now, after a few months of thinking that it was sort of pointless… why would anyone care to receive random updates about my life? That is, until I realized it could be a great way to connect with people that I wouldn’t normally communicate with. Then when I found out that tons of other new media types were on it, posting links to the latest industry stories, videos, events, and general interesting tidbits, I started to see some merit in it.

Now I love twitter! I look forward to hearing what all my twitter friends have to say each day, and most of it I find really helpful. I can learn about the latest news story in town hours, days, or even weeks before it shows up in the local papers or newscasts. I can find new contacts in my industry to get to know and talk geeky with. And I can even show support for local businesses, like the awesome work @VancouverOpera is doing to bring Opera to the people!

As far as my own posts go, I try to post tweets that are helpful. You won’t hear me tweeting about my deepest thoughts, the colour of shirt I’m wearing, or my bathroom activities.. if I don’t find it useful, I’m not going to share it, because you won’t want to read it! In fact, unlike blogs or most other forms of publication, your twitter followers don’t penalize you for infrequent updates.. I’d venture to say the opposite is true. Followers drop if they feel they’re getting spammed. So I try not to post too many times a day, because anyone who uses twitter knows how frustrating it can be to have your entire feed spammed by one or two people, whether they’re useful tweets or not. Moral of the story; if I don’t have anything useful to say, I just wait until I do.

That’s my experience with twitter, but what about yours?
Do you use twitter? Why or why not?

To make a good thing even better, the maps still display great business listings so you can find what you’re looking for whether it’s the nearest laundromat, or a new restaurant for date-night dinner – only rather than seeing it like a big tack on a map, you can now take a look from street level to find exactly where it is, and what it looks like. This a super fun and enjoyable process too, especially using the fullscreen mode (pictured above) which offers options to adjust image brightness, sharpness, projection/angle, to zoom in/out, and more.

In addition to these features, the app also has a very easy to use interface. Click on or near any of the blue lines on the map, and you’ll be taken to a street view of the nearest recorded street. From there, you can drag the blue view cone of the street view icon guy and the image will adjust in realtime to face whichever direction you choose.

Similarly to the Google Street View, you can also nudge your way along a street by clicking the blue dots (the closest pad will take you to the next photo, but you can reach ahead a few pads to jump a little further). Maybe a cyber trip down to English Bay will tickle your fancy?

Another great thing about the Canpages Street View is the coverage they already have online. Rather than being limited to the downtown core, the system reaches into Stanley Park, around Vancouver, out to the airport in Richmond, up to SFU on Burnaby Mountain, even to downtown New Westminster, where condominium projects are still barreling along. (and don’t forget Whistler!)

With such an easy to use interface, high quality images, and integration with the Canpages listings, I definitely suggest checking it out if you have a few extra minutes this weekend. Simply head over to Canpages.ca, enter in a category of business you’re looking for, and browse the streetscapes of Metro Vancouver to your heart’s content!

(please note this site is, in fact, not canpages, so searching for your street on my blog won’t give you any results)