Google Latitude
Seems that Google is throwing its hat into the ring with its own location aware social networking app and mobile friend finder called Latitude. The news is being well covered today including a great summary on O’Reilly Radar as well as one right there on the front page of AllthingsD.com today, Silicon Alley Insider and some particularly intersesting insidery point of view from the ex Googler and Dodgeball founder. All of those give some nice details about how it works, so I won’t bother going into much detail here, except to say that Latitude seems to work like other similar services including Loopt, Buddy Beacon, Brightkite, Limbo, etc. Where the application determines your location through one of a variety of ways and then lets you share it with friends, with a number of different controls to monitor with whom and to what detail (if at all) you share your location data.
One reason that it is noteworthy is of course because it’s Google doing it… and while literally dozens of small start ups have tried to build something similar and attract users from scratch with location awarness as a core benefit, Google seems to view location sharing/friend finder as another added feature to go along with Google Maps as sort of an extension to finding things on a map (hey why not find people too?) and GMail/GTalk, as an extended way to communicate with someone you know (hey, why not see them in person as well as emailing them?). I am still trying to wrap my head around that one a bit… should current location be as universally available and shared as ones phone number or street address (ie integration into an Outlook contact field) or is it better suited at this point as another facet of your life to be shared only with a more tight and existing social network?
It does seem odd that there wasn’t a specific tie into the social networking side of Google in Orkut, where Latitude would presumably be most right at home, although news on that may still be around the corner. I am sure we’ll see something before too long from folks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace as well.
I’ve see a couple of articles that seem to think that this announcement will mean the death of folks like Loopt and Limbo. I think this may be premature, heck in the short term they may even see a nice boost as overall consumer awareness is lifted and potentially attitudes are changed… hey Google’s mantra is ‘do no evil’, so if they’re letting people track each other, maybe that’s not so bad afterall?
Once LinkedIn or Facebook comes out with something similar, then, I think we’re getting closer to that come to Jesus moment for folks like Loopt, Limbo and Buddy Beacon, who may then be relegated to being a white label solution to power the location element of other existing communities/networks.
If Google is doing it in a big and mass way, and Mossberg’s squad over at the Wall Street Journal are reviewing it and putting it on the front page of allthingsD then I think it must be pretty close to going mainstream. I for one can’t wait to see a higher level of consumer consciousness and adoption, so we can begin to move along with all the other cool stuff that first requires getting this basic concept acceptance under our belts.
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