Interactive Marketing Blog

It seems for the last few days it’s been only about Google. I think by now, you people might have realised this too. But lets face it, they have been doing some neat things with their all their latest innovations.

Next in stop from them is new Google Mobile Maps feature called Google Latitude. This new feature basically lets us broadcast our current location to a select few people based on where on the GPS from our mobile phone. 

Sometime back TechCrunch flashed this newstory saying

the feature is an application in itself  where you are able to keep track of people’s locations, call, email or instant message them at any given time. The application also offers a “list view” which reads like a friendfeed stream.  

Some of the phones where it will work as of now are:

For iPhone & iPod Touch users, Android-powered devices such as the T-Mobile G1 and many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones have to wait a bit longer for this feature. And as usual this feature is also free.

As TheNextWeb notes,

its bad news for location based social networks such as Loopt, Whrrl and Brightkite all of which are doing their best to become THE mobile social network, yet as with many areas Google is able to gain a large foothold of the market with just one update to a product.

P.S. If you don’t feel like showing your friends where you are, then you can fake your location or simply choose to not be shown at all.  

Update: I registered my mobile (Nokia E71) for the service and got a message instantly “Go to http://m.google.com/latitude on your mobile browser“. I think it will work like a charm but yeah the question looms over privacy and lobbying to some extent though. BTW it got launched in 27 countries.