Once Google Got Your Latitude, It Is Mobile Business Time!
One day you ask yourself if being tracked through GPS is not a tad disturbing, if this is something people would adopt, and the next day you read that tracking your friends on a map is now possible 24/7. Google announced yesterday the upcoming release of Latitude, A simple service that will ping your location every once in a while, and let a selected few of your choice know about it.
Latitude will be accessible for all G1, iPhones, Blackberry, and javascript-enabled phones in general. The privacy settings give users leeway in terms of public accessibility: Google’s servers don’t track movements, they merely provide the last waypoint where a user was marked. This means that you can’t track anyone’s daily pattern of movement. You can also determine the specificity of your beacon, showing an exact city block or just the city itself. Only friends on your contact list can see your location. You can set up different privacy levels for each contacts though.
Latitude is not a mobile-only experience. There is a Latitude gadget for iGoogle to spot friends from your laptop (Gmail contacts of course). Latitude will track your mobile location, and through Gears, it will also track your laptop position.
Shegeeks‘ blogger Corvida brings an interesting point in a blog post on Louis Gray’s blog: Location-aware services such as Loopt and Brightkite should thank Google for publicizing a service that they do better than Google for the moment.
Brightkite introduces me to new people to hang out with. [...] The amount of information available for specific check-in spots is amazing! I can see who’s been there, how many times they’ve been there, check out their profile and see if we have similar interests. Hey, they might even be friends with me on Twitter! For this sole reason alone, Brightkite and other similar services have nothing to fear for now. In fact, they might want to thank Google.
I shared a few comments in this post, where I argue that Google is more interested in building a back-end geolocalization technology that would seamlessly integrate with other Google products. latitude is just a way to get things started.
On the Fast Company site, Chris Dannen brings up the idea that Latitude could work in perfect harmony with Local Business Center, Google’s own Yellow Pages:
You don’t have to be Al Gore to see the potential; if advertisers can tap into your location and mash it up with locations of their outlets or services and your browsing history, you’ll be hit with perhaps the most targeted ads humankind has ever known. Imagine having your mobile phone kindly inform you that you’re two blocks from your best friend, and in between you both, there lies a Starbucks where you two can meet.
That sounds like something Google would do. Mapping technologies over at Google are not ready yet to support such a complex operation. Google Maps is barely in its early monetization days, so everything is going to remain pretty experimental for the next 2 or 3 years to come.
Tags: gears, geolocalization, google maps, gps, latitude, mobile
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