Want to show your far-off family and friends what your new house looks like? What about downtown Lawrence, the boat docks at Clinton Lake or even the back of the chancellor’s residence?

It just takes a couple of mouse clicks and you can, thanks to Google’s Street View. This week, Google added 12 new cities and their suburbs to its mapping feature that gives panoramic, ground-level images of streets. Kansas City and its surrounding communities – stretching from Lawrence to Independence, Mo. – were among the 12 added.

Since launching the feature in May, Google has mapped 35 metro areas.

With Street View, www.maps.google.com, users can type in an address and click on the Street View icon. From there they click on arrows at the top of the screen to rotate the image to see the full 360-degree view of the street.

For instance, look up 901 Mass. and up pops the familiar Weaver’s department store. Then use the arrows to rotate around the intersection of Ninth and Massachusetts streets to images of U.S. Bank, Third Planet Imports and Second Chance children’s clothing store.

The pictures were taken months ago during warmer and greener weather by a camera mounted on top of an automobile.

Anything visible from the street is caught in the photos. Houses, vehicles and people are all easy to identify. And you can zoom in, close enough to see newspapers on a front porch, oil stains in a driveway and unraked leaves in yards.

Privacy concerns have been raised with the feature. In a September 2007 blog entry, Google said it collects only images that can be seen by anyone walking on a public street. It also noted the company would consider removing images of identifiable people, objectionable content such as nudity and sites such as domestic violence shelters. And people can request that images of their homes be removed from the site.