I visited this over a year ago and I still feel the same way. For someone to invest their time and effort using these online mapping APIs and not have access to the metadata really hurts. Take this example; in jest the Virtual Earth team posted on keeping an eye on their competitors such as Google and joked that “no one actually works at the Googleplex given the barren parking lots”. Of course we all know it must be a holiday/weekend when the picture was taken, but in reality, can we really be sure? For companies such as Zillow who use this “Bird’s Eye View”, one would think that they would want to know when the image was taken. Maybe they have this information, but end uses don’t. Copyrights don’t do us any good.
Time is such a big component of data and being blindfolded only limits the value of these APIs.