Google Latitude is finally here for iPhone but not as a iPhone app but as a web application.
Google Latitude is a social location service that lets you share your current location with your friends. Social Location services have been around for a while as iPhone apps and you may have seen some of it – BrightKite, Loopt, Dopplr, etc.
Google Latitude iPhone Web App
Google Latitude offers basic location service by letting you set your location automatically by letting your iPhone find you or you can manually set it yourself.
You can also see your friend’s location if he/she chose to share it with you.
To launch Google Latitude you’d launch Safari and go to http://google.com/latitude in your iPhone. This was made possible with Safari getting the W3C Geolocation API with iPhone OS 3.0 that lets your browser access location information.
Here are a few screenshots of Google Latitude in action. The functionality is pretty basic and is pretty evident from these images.
Why Apple is Right this time?
In the Google Mobile blog, you can see that Google actually built a iPhone application for Google Latitude but rejected by Apple and was asked to build a web app instead. Google’s iPhone app would have tightly integrated into the Maps application.
And if I were Apple, I’d do the same for these reasons:
- The Native maps apps is ‘Maps’ and not Google Maps. Apple could change to a better mapping service if one should come about anytime.
- I wouldn’t want to confuse the majority of the iPhone users using Maps but not Latitude with added clutter in Maps app
- Just because Google Mas earned its place in iPhone doesn’t provide a rite of passage to any other Map/Location related apps they may introduce.
Google Latitude is a pretty well done app for a web app and we can definitely look to see more improvements in this space in the near future. I have never gotten used to using Loopt, BrightKite regularly but since I am logged into Google anyway in my Safari, I might try out Latitude more than I would normally just to see if there is a benefit.
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