12:01 a.m. this morning on The Official Google Blog:
Latitude is a new feature for Google Maps on your mobile device [Android rolls out next week, an iPhone app soon after]. It’s also an iGoogle gadget on your computer. Once you’ve opted in to Latitude, you can see the approximate location of your friends and loved ones who have decided to share their location with you… And with Latitude, not only can you see your friends’ locations on a map, but you can also be in touch directly via SMS, Google Talk, Gmail, or by updating your status message; you can even upload a new profile photo on the fly. It’s a fun way to feel close to the people you care about.
You can also use it from your computer. From here, login, and follow the instructions to install the gadget. SearchEngineLand’s Greg Sterling has a review:
Google Maps for Mobile is hugely popular and has a very large installed user base. Latitude is not a separate service that people need to separately adopt and configure but an extension of existing Maps for Mobile functionality. People simply need to download the latest version of Maps for their phone and opt-in to location sharing.
Latitude’s location-awareness capabilities are built on Google’s Wifi and cell tower triangulation that form the basis for its My Location tool.
That’s a much more automated approach than the manual “check-in” process used by Dodgeball, a service that Google decided in January to shut down…. With the service, you can hide from specific people or disappear altogether. And you can manually set a specific location if, for example, your phone can’t show it with sufficient precision or if you wish to tell someone a white lie about whether you really aren’t going to go to the candy store.
So privacy’s no worry? ReadWriteWeb’s Rick Turoczy says it’s all about the data:
For millions of users, Google already knows how they search, what they click, what they buy, who they know, how they communicate, and where they go on the Web. Location enables them to add another critical data point – where they are when they’re performing any of those actions. So if you think Google has too much information about you already, you’ve got another think coming.
Long story short, Latitude adds a whole new level of complexity to Google’s understanding of you and your habits. And while we’ll no doubt derive some very interesting benefits from sharing that information, we should hold no illusions about the value of that data to Google and its efforts to run a profitable business.
Google expects its mapping technology will lead to location-based advertising revenue.