Web Tools: Google Latitude
by Brad Johnston on Apr.20, 2010, under tech
This week we’re exploring the various social networking web tools available. I chose a location aware app called Google Latitude. With this app, I can see my friends’ locations, status messages and share mine with them on my mobile phone or on the Internet.
Why did I choose this app? A couple of reasons. I’ve always been fond of Google’s products over the last decade, plus or minus a few years. I also recently received a Google Latitude invite from a friend that also led to my decision to use this app.
Google Latitude was easy to start using with little or no instruction. If anyone wanted more information, Google provided several highlighted features and a video. It also helped that I had pending invites from two friends to see how the app interacted with other users. One of the invites was over a year old — whoops.
In a nutshell, this tool makes it easy to find your friends. You can control your privacy settings on whether you want to share your location at all, set it manually, or just to temporarily hide yourself from the world.
I can see this being a tool being used mostly outside of the workplace. However, it could be a useful tool for businesses to track employee location. Now whether or not that’s legal, I couldn’t tell you! Personally, it saves a lot of trouble for two friends trying to find each other. Instead of trying to explain to a friend of where you’re at, they can simply look you up with the help of this app and get detailed directions on how to get to where you are — or at least to the same city. See a screenshot below from my iPhone to see how the app looks.
http://www.google.com/mobile/latitude/
