As cool as it is, the reality is that geography changes: cities evolve, roads are built, closed, etc. Maintaining an up-to-date database of those views can only be done to serve another, very lucrative purpose, the one of which only Google & al. can offer. I don't think a community-based approach can work when the scale of effort is this high.
Im not to sure about that. Number of pictures are growing exponentially (28 million an counting) and soon there are more active weekly users than there are google street view cars. The whole point with crowdsourcing is that streets changes.
This is really interesting, but I'll second the intuition that building a critical mass for StreetView-like data is probably one of the hardest thing to crowdsource.
It's just not fun to be driving each and every road around where you live. Besides, without an hemispheric camera data is really limited.
Actually, building a critical mass of streetView-like data can happen while having other goals in mind.
For example, I live in São Paulo and I'm a member of OpenStreetMap. Every time I ride in a bike lane, I take photos of it with mapillary, so it gets way easier to map them.
By the way, the OSM coverage of bike lanes in São Paulo, because of the help of mapillary, is the best one in all maps available (even the city hall ones)
