When I first moved to San Francisco I'd fallen in love with the novels of Armistead Maupin, and hoped that I'd meet a landlady as kind and accommodating as Mrs Madrigal. With a comedy typical of that city, I ended up doing just that, and my gorgeous landlady Rose took me under her wing and ended up renting me an amazing four bedroom apartment on Fulton Street at a very low rent. I won her heart by taking down the unpleasant plastic house number outside the front door and putting up a smart brass house number that was much more appropriate for an elegant Victorian house. Which is a nice story, but seeing is believing, right?

So go to Google maps and put in the address of my old apartment: 1080 Fulton Street. You'll see a new button on the right called Street View. When you click all the Street View accessible streets on the map are highlighted in blue, and a little yellow icon of a man appears. Simply drag and drop the man to my old address and a photograph appears. Only it's not just a photograph: it's a panorama you can navigate, rotate, and zoom in on. In about a minute I was able to zoom in the old front door of my house, and with a bit of jigging about find the shining brass house number that I nailed up one hot summer day ten years ago.

These images were captured by Google sending a van around the streets of the city, and represent a sort of instant Polaroid of the city on a particular day and time. That's why you can see the image of a man walking in front of my old flat, wearing blue trousers with a cavalry stripe and a pale blue shirt. Who is he, I wonder? If you know him, or if you are him, send me an e-mail. I'd like to know how he feels about being frozen in aspic online until Google decides to update his map.

Privacy advocates have pointed out that there may be times when we don't want to be photographed on the street – joint in hand, exiting a strip club, emerging from a sneaky matinee. Google is well aware of these issues and has, for example, blurred out the details of women's shelters, to improve the safety of people who may be vulnerable to stalkers. For the smokers, strip club habitués, and adulterers, it points out that they're in the street and anyone can capture their image – although not everyone will be incorporating it into a global mapping engine built on the most powerful web service the world has ever seen.

Given that life in the UK is now essentially a series of Orwellian performances – leaving your webcam to drive past street cameras and then nod to the camera in your lift before you sit down and start streaming video from your desk – I find that I'm curiously unbothered by the privacy implications of all this. It feels like we've lost so much privacy already that this final blow has lost its impact. What intrigues me about this service is seeing the creation of what 3D pundits call a mirror world – an exact online recreation of the real world online, which has useful and complicated relationships to the real world we all actually live in.

The modernist obsessive James Joyce was often heard boasting that his meticulous recreation of Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day on which Ulysses is set, was detailed enough that were the city to be destroyed it could be recreated from his text alone. He worked hard at getting the details right, using reference books and checking facts from exile by writing to friends, soliciting train timetables, maps, and the flotsam and jetsam of urban life to get the texture of his city of the imagination right.

A modern day Joyce won't have to rely on his friends. Once Google's vans have prowled its streets, he'll be able to fire up a web browser, walk down Rock Road, turn left at Seafort Parade, and study his Martello Tower with hologrammatic accuracy and detail. There's something strangely poignant about watching technology execute in seconds what artists have only been able to achieve partially in a lifetime's struggle. It also raises interesting questions about access to each other's experience. If I'm writing about a place I've never been, and it's on Google's service, I can walk the streets of the mirror world in Manhattan, or San Francisco, or Miami, and listen to music from the neighbourhood, and read the local classified ads online. Our sense of place, like everything else about the modern affluent self, is becoming more and more negotiable.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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