3pointD.com

MapJack.com is a new Web site offering the kind of street-level views that Google Maps‘ Street View feature does, only in better focus and with a more interesting interface. MapJack only has San Francisco, for now — and only part of that city, to tell you the truth — but if they can add more streets and cities and find a way to capture users’ attention, it could become a useful or at least entertaining tool — more entertaining than Google’s feature. MapJack splits your browser window in two, as seen above, with a satellite street map in the bottom and a street-level photograph above (of better quality than Google’s; see comparative screenshot after the jump). You can place “Jack” on any of the blue dots on the map, and you can also click on the dots in the photo to move him around. Since he’s a tiny little articulated avatar, you can also see which way he’s facing.

I found the service worked really well. You can plug in an address in a search box, and at the very bottom of the screen there’s even a URL to Jack’s position, so you can show your friends what a particular streetcorner looks like. And the shots are definitely better than Google’s. They’re generated with “an array of proprietary electronics, hardware and software tools that enable us to capture an entire city’s streets with relative ease and excellent image quality,” according to a MapJack press release. I suspect they’ve got a lot of work to do before this takes off — and it remains to be seen whether people are in any kind of need for this kind of service anyway — but it’s definitely well done, and an interesting way to browse around a city.

The same location, in Google Maps’ Street View