About five months ago, Google started a contest to determine where its Street View trike would take pictures in the U.S.  Today, Google released some impressive stats concerning participation, and also announced the winning locations.

Let’s start by establishing how many people took an interest in where Google will send its trike.  A post on the Official Google Blog explained that nearly 25,000 suggestions were made, and that a whopping 238,000 folks cast votes.

Unless everyone was just trying to send the trike "somewhere else," this counts as significant indicator of Street View’s popularity.  Which is a bit interesting in light of the speed bumps the program’s hit in Europe.

As for the places the trike will wind up, they include the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, the National Mall in D.C., and the Detroit Zoo.  Then the Boulder Creek Path (a Colorado bike trail) is the last member of the group.

Google intends to photograph at least some of these locations in the near future.  If you live close to them, either start planning a memorable getup or eyeing good hiding spots as you see fit.

About five months ago, Google started a contest to determine where its Street View trike would take pictures in the U.S.  Today, Google released some impressive stats concerning participation, and also announced the winning locations.

Let’s start by establishing how many people took an interest in where Google will send its trike.  A post on the Official Google Blog explained that nearly 25,000 suggestions were made, and that a whopping 238,000 folks cast votes.

Unless everyone was just trying to send the trike "somewhere else," this counts as significant indicator of Street View’s popularity.  Which is a bit interesting in light of the speed bumps the program’s hit in Europe.

As for the places the trike will wind up, they include the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, the National Mall in D.C., and the Detroit Zoo.  Then the Boulder Creek Path (a Colorado bike trail) is the last member of the group.

Google intends to photograph at least some of these locations in the near future.  If you live close to them, either start planning a memorable getup or eyeing good hiding spots as you see fit.

PC World is pointing to an interesting study that has found that some popular social sites are not really deleting you photos when you think they are. When the average user deletes a photo they have posted on Facebook for example, they assume that photo is gone.

This is not always the case however. The University of Cambridge has discovered that at least seven popular sites might still have those photos live for as many as thirty days. These seven sites are:

- Facebook
- MySpace
- Bebo
- hi5
- LiveJournal
- SkyRock
- Xanga

Meanwhile, sites like Windows Live Spaces, Orkut, Photobucket, and Flickr were able to remove photos almost immediately.

In actuality, the offending sites have removed the images from their servers. It’s just that the images still resided on content delivery networks, which store them. BBC News quotes a Facebook spokesperson on the matter:

"When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately. However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten. Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time." 

Those trying to manage their online reputations are going to have to consider that their efforts might not be enough in some cases. If nothing else, this should be a lesson to think about what photos you are posting of yourself to begin with.