I don't know what makes me gasp when I recognize my faded green mailbox with its little red flag. There it is, perched on a white post at the top of the sun-dappled gravel driveway that curves into the woods around my house.

I found the mundane but mysterious images online as part of Street View, a Google mapping gizmo that landed in the Triangle last week.

Street View provides a stream of panoramic pictures recorded last year by a crew that drove up and down almost every street from Garner to Mebane and from Carrboro to Wake Forest.

If it felt freaky the first time you glimpsed a satellite view of your own roof and yard online, it's something else to take a virtual cruise on the street where you live.

Satellite photos have become a popular part of Mapquest, Google and other mapping sites. These street-level pictures are a new way to see our community, or to tour a city we've never set foot in. Whether people will find them actually useful -- or merely captivating -- is another question.

For a test drive, click over to maps.google.com and zero in on the Triangle or type in a local address. Click the Street View button. A blue neon glow lines the streets that are covered.

You navigate by dragging a humanoid icon across the map and then pressing your arrow keys -- or clicking the arrows on what looks like a floating yellow lane stripe that runs across the streetscape.

When were these pictures made? Local blogger Tony Spencer (tonyspencer.com) spotted what appeared to be a Google Beetle on the street in August, its roof adorned with a pole-mounted panoramic camera.

These are 360-degree images. You can tilt up and down, peer at what's ahead or spin around to see what you just passed.

It's clunky, but it's cool. The Triangle rolls past your windshield in a jerky blur.

Some streets appear to have been photographed on several different days. As you mouse your way through downtown Raleigh on Capital Boulevard and Dawson Street, the rosy glint of dawn at Peace Street gives way to bright midday shadows at Jones Street.

The skies turn gray and the images grow dim for the next few blocks of Dawson, and then a glorious midafternoon sun pops out at Davie Street.

One test of Street View's value will come when Google decides whether to update these pictures frequently -- to catch up with the high-rise construction projects in downtown Raleigh, for example -- or to let them grow stale.

The online mapping services have struggled to stay current with street and highway construction. Google still hasn't noticed the 540 Outer Loop link that opened last summer in western Wake County.

Street View had fans and critics when Google launched it in May in five cities (now it's in about 30). Users remarked on its high-resolution images -- you could read parking signs and recognize pedestrians.

There were debates about invasion of privacy. Some folks were embarrassed, and they asked Google to delete their pictures.

It's hard to imagine such a fuss with Street View's Triangle edition. The images are muddier and seem to have been shot in lower resolution -- perhaps deliberately.

Check out Street View in the middle of San Francisco, for example, and you can zoom in on the distinctive faces of folks crossing the street or waiting for the bus. But at a bus stop on Duke's East Campus in Durham, you can't make out the seated statue of Washington Duke.

And, try as I might, I cannot identify the mystery jogger on my little cul-de-sac in rural Orange County.

I see her from behind and then, as I move past her image, I swivel back to study her blurry face. She is frozen in mid-stride, but her image seems to move in three dimensions.

I check back the next day, and she hasn't budged.