Google’s Street View caused excitement and controversy in almost equal measure as a camera car was sent around the streets of the world with a view to creating a fully interactive map of the countries of the world. History Pin is a new mapping services that makes use of Google Street View, coupled with historical photographs uploaded by users to enable you to take a step back in time.

Web sites that enable users to upload photos and place them on a map are nothing new, but History Pin’s neat integration with Google Street View really makes it stand out from the crowd. You can search for where you live and discover if anyone nearby has uploaded old photographs of your home town.

This in itself is interesting enough, but images can also be precisely placed on a map and viewed in Google Street View mode as an overlay. This makes it possible to see how street have changed over the years and to compare the look and feel of now and then.

Anyone is free to upload images they may have, from private photographers to institutions with a large collection of images. History Pin is still currently in beta as has not been up and running for very long, but as word spreads and more images are uploaded, it is likely to transform into a wonderfully interesting and useful resource.

One particularly interesting feature of History Pin is the timeline. This really comes into its own when you’re looking at famous locations or tourist landmarks for which a large number of images have been uploaded. As individual photographs can be dated as well as geotagged, the timeline slider can be used to step back and forth through time displaying the appropriate images for the selected date.

Users are free to comment on photos that have been uploaded ad attach story to help elaborate on the associated history. History Pin is a quite unique web site, and it is one to keep an eye on over the coming months as it grows in popularity and the level of content increases accordingly.