In addition to their Bird’s Eye View (which provides angled aerial views created by flyovers), MSN has added Street Side views to Live Local. The views show you what things would look like while driving from your car (as opposed to A9’s blockview which shows straight on pictures of the buildings/locations.

MSN Street-Side Preview

The new street-side feature augments the current map view,
aerial view, and bird’s eye view that the Windows Live Local site
already has today to provide users with an even more immersive way to
explore their local environment.

A preview will be available will be available shortly from what I am told (still not available as of this post).

UPDATE: Preview just lauched seconds ago. There is a Rac Car view, a sports car view and a walk view. The “car” you see on the map (or a black/yellow circle if you’re walking) is draggable. You can also drag the “view” to turn yourself and look in other directions. Whn I push the forward arrow, I “drive” down the street. Bonus points for making it work well with Firefox! Still a few kinks to owrk out (mostly around the flow which is still a bit jarring) but very cool. Only available for San Francisco & Seattale right now. Nice little amusing details (i.e. game controller on dash of both cars, navigation systems, etc). Turning around makes it look like you’re crashing into cars on some streets (looks like video was taken out the back of the car). Driving with your keyboards makes it almost seem as if you’re playing a video game. My biggest annoyance: not being able to resize the 2 panes…the bottom pane was almost non-existent so I had to resize the window (rather than drag the pane divider higher). Also, the side views are kind of hard to orient with the forward view…probably why they like to use the columns separating them to help mesh the pictures.
UPDATE: Scoble points us to the video demo

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