Thoughts on Google Latitude’s New Location History & Alerts
Although I’ve watched too many Hollywood spy & technology thrillers to activate Google Latitude on my G1 phone, I do admire a nice piece of technology when I see it. When Google Latitude came out I found it to be a clever development with potential in geographical social networking. Yesterday, Google added a beta feature which allows Latitude to alert you (and others) when you’re in a certain proximity. I immediately thought:
- This would make a nice piece for a geo-locational gaming, promotions and marketing
- Internally, a possible low-cost back-end for location intensive services (delivery, service reps, etc)
From the Official Google Mobile Blog: “Since the launch of Google Latitude earlier this year, we’ve been getting a lot of feature requests. One of the most popular ideas was for Latitude to keep track of location history, allowing you (but not your friends) to see where you’ve been at any point in time. Another popular idea was to notify you when you’re near your Latitude friends so you can easily meet up or grab lunch. Today, we’re happy to introduce both Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (beta) to let you do even more with Latitude.”