Google Latitude: friends see you now, advertisers later?
Date: 04.02.2009Google Mobile Maps is rolling out a new feature tonight called Google Latitude. It allows you to broadcast your physical location to selected friends, family, and colleagues based on the coordinates of your mobile phone (via GPS or triangulation). If you have the GPS feature enabled in Google Maps on your mobile phone, you will have seen the pulsating blue dot on the map that shows you wherever you are. Google Latttude now lets you share that blue dot with whoever you choose.
Google Latitude is also a full mobile program in itself. (You can download it from your mobile at google.com/latitude). You can keep track of where everyone is at any time, and from within the program you can call, email, or Instant Message them. Everyone you have chosen to follow shows up as a picture icon on a map or in a list view. The list view is like a location-based Twitter.
If you don’t feel like being tracked, then you just hide yourself from select “friends,” or manually enter a false location as your current one. You can control how much privacy you want on a very granular, contact-by-contact level.
We can see where this is going. Once Google Latitude has a critical mass of users and millions of people are using it, the next step will be for Google to open this up to its advertisers. Users will get offers from local advertisers that have a presence within the vicinity.
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