Do you know where your spouse is?

by Volker Weber

Using My Location, millions of you have been able to easily find yourselves on a map at the touch of a button. But what about finding other people? Lots of you have been requesting to see where your friends are on a map, too. Well now you can with Google Latitude.

This is going to be the mother of all location services. Google Latitude is Google Maps Mobile version 3.

On your mobile phone: visit google.com/latitude from your phone's mobile browser to download Google Maps for mobile with Latitude. We currently support most of the popular smartphone platforms: Android, Blackberry, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile, and we are hoping to see Latitude on the iPhone soon. It will be available through Google Mobile App, and you'll just need to download or update the app from the App store to find Latitude in the Apps tab.

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Comments

I for one, don't think I will be using this application (cool as it may be). Google already knows way too much about me, this screams of endless possible bad things that could happen....

See The private net for more of my thoughts about Google, privacy and steps to keep things off the Google servers.

Jens-Christian Fischer, 2009-02-04

Nice touch - the first sample image on the latitude page is actually my hometown (and I'm not using my mobile right now, I'm on my desktop computer). Yes, I know how this works, it's a nice touch nonetheless :-)

Slightly off topic - are there any decent mobile applications for location/proximity based available alarms yet?

I guess this will be an additional feature of latitide later down the road.

Marc Beckersjuergen, 2009-02-04

@Jens-Christian: correct, and it´s not my spouse I am afraid of. It´s the general availability of peronal data, which none of us have any opportunity to delete, change or filter. All of this makes 1984 seem like a children´s fairy tale to me.

We are producing and adopting all kind of tools, somebody with not so nice intentions can make good use of later in time.

Try to get rid of stuff stored on the internet a couple of years back from all available sources. It´s hardly doable, due to all kinds of archives outside of user´s reach, even using a commercial service.

Armin Roth, 2009-02-04

this would actually be really useful for me and my wife. She goes running in the evenings and it is useful to see where she is.

Unfortunately although the location on the device is correct the location on the PC is at least a mile out !! I think that would create more anxiety.

Sean Cull, 2009-02-04

The Google mobile blog invites comments for the new product - and the comments pouring in suggest its launch is 'a bit previous' as we used to say.

It is by no means world-wide coverage, and many of the advertised platforms are not really supported yet. So, it will be interesting to see how it looks and performs in a month's time, but for the moment... perhaps not.

Nick Daisley, 2009-02-04

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