Google’s solution to Where’s Waldo?: Google Latitude
Posted by Manuela Barreto @ February 5th, 2009 in Social Marketing
Mom’s been calling you non-stop all day long- wouldn’t you love throwing your phone out the window? Your friends don’t stop sms-ing you to ask you about your whereabouts come Saturday?
Google has rolled out a possible solution to these particular problems. Google’s mapping application has just undergone an upgrade that lets people track down friends, colleagues and relatives in a total of 27 countries around the world and 42 languages.
Google Latitude is the new feature from Google Maps which works for both PCs, adds on to the iGadgets list, and mobile phones, allowing you to be in touch with friends via Google Talk and Gmail. Latitude helps you find your friend’s location on a map at any given time. Once you have selected a group of friends you’d like to share locations with, both your picture icon and their picture icon will show up on the map and show-up as a list on the sidebar.
If for some reason you don’t find this convenient and need to instead be ’secretive’ about your whereabouts, you can do so by controlling how much privacy you want on a contact-to-contact basis, or even simpler, you can enter a fake location for yourself.
In any case, Google has also included detailed privacy settings on the application so you will be full owner of your personal location, thus you are not forced to display your approximate location; settings are entirely modifiable.
Head to google.com/latitude from your PC or mobile to opt-in to Latitude and try it out. Set up, contact-by-contact, who will be able to see your live updates and who won’t, plus you can even set-up status messages for specific friends.
and yes, it will soon be available for Apple’s mobile devices…Visit TechCrunch to read more about Latitude for mobiles.
Are you up for it? Let us know what you think!
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Comments
Peter
February 5th, 2009
Very clever. So naturally the next step for Google….location based real time advertising showing relevant ads to you where ever you may be. Spooky.
Real-Time, the Buzzword of Social Media , 77Lab
March 30th, 2009
[...] social networks as well. Of course mobile social network like Brightkite or the application Google Latitude are naturally oriented towards real-time as they show you where your friends are and what they are [...]