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Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Share Your Location (Or Lie About It) With Google Latitude

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Share Your Location (Or Lie About It) With Google Latitude

via Mashable! by Stan Schroeder on 4/02/09

google_latitude_logo I've been hyping up location-based mobile services as the next big thing in mobile, and the usual counter-argument I get is: "people don't really want everyone to know where they are."

Well, now we'll see if this is true, because Google has launched a new Mobile Maps application called Latitude, which lets you share your location with your friends and see where (approximately) they are.

latitude-nyc When it comes to privacy, Google seems to have done it right, since absolutely everything about Latitude is opt-in. You can control who sees your location, and choose which locations are visible (for example, you can lie about your location, manually setting it to something else). All of this can be set up for each individual Latitude friend. For example, you can set it up so that your wife always sees you at work. Why you'd want to do that, we leave to your imagination.

This approach makes Latitude a very interesting application. I can imagine some users simply setting their location to always be visible to everyone; others might want to spin a complex web of deceit which will ultimately make their life miserable. It's like a game; you can choose how interesting you want it to be.

For a list of supported phones, check here. Believe it or not, the iPhone and iPod Touch are in the "coming soon" category, which is a big minus for Google. You can also visit google.com/latitude on your desktop and install the Latitude iGoogle gadget, which lets you share your location from your desktop computer.

As far as supported countries go, currently there are 27 of them, and mine (Croatia) unfortunately isn't one of them; Google promises to add support for more countries soon.

Check out Google's introductory video below: