No, that’s not a typo.
If I haven’t made it clear before, I freakin’ love Google Maps. As if it couldn’t get any better, the street-view interface has been updated with the ability to click-and-drag your way to new destinations, or even new perspectives. Ovals (for linear distances) and rectangles (for the edifices of buildings) indicate where you want the focus of your street view to land, whether you’re zooming ahead along a street or zooming in for a closeup of a wall.
Google calls these ovals and squares “pancakes” — both silly and scrumptious, but the analogy works.
To preview it, here’s a video demo:
You can also check out the the official and original entry on the Google Blog.
And for the record, I’m jealous of the hypothetical computer user in this demo, who apparently has the time and money to visit Paris, and Florence, and Sydney, and Amsterdam.