My Latitude moment  |  February 12, 2009  

I had a Google Latitude moment this morning. It was early, very dark out and raining heavily. My wife was waiting for a colleague to pick her up. The woman had never been to our house and, as we discovered when our phone rang, she had taken a wrong turn.

I heard one end of the conversation. “So where are you?”…“On Truscott?”…“Oh, you passed it. So do you see the Bruno’s plaza?”...“No?”...“Oh, you’re on Clarkson?”…“Yes, but it runs south too.”…

As it went on like that for a few minutes, I flashed to a blog post I had just read. Robert Scoble, on the topic of Google’s new social-media mapping service, wrote: “I used it with Microsoft’s Jeff Sandquist last Thursday as I was meeting him for breakfast and he said he could see my icon moving closer to him and knew exactly when I would walk through the door for breakfast. I find that kind of technology pretty fun and useful.”

Useful indeed. Had my wife and her colleague had Latitude enabled, we could have checked her location on a map and supplied turn-by-turn directions to our door.

Latitude is a new feature of Google Maps that lets users see the real-time location of friends and colleagues. Users can also communicate with each other through Latitude, if they wish.

Now before the privacy people get all worked up, Google built in robust privacy settings, allowing users to share their precise location, a general city-level location or no information at all. You can even lie about your whereabouts. So privacy is not an issue here: you decide who knows what and when.

Latitude is currently available in 27 countries and it works on a big list of cell and smartphones, with more coming.

And as Scoble said, Latitude is going to be both fun and useful. Imagine your teenager is spending the summer backpacking in Europe: wouldn’t it be interesting to follow him/her to the Louvre, Versailles and Chartes? You could even send a quick e-mail reminiscing about the time you walked the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral.

Or maybe you’re sitting at home waiting for your aged mother to pull into the driveway during a bad snowstorm. You’re worried and you’d like to check on her, but you don’t want her fumbling with her cellphone on the highway. Latitude could reassure you that she’s moving along the highway and will be home in a few minutes.

Google Latitude and similar services like BrightKite and Loopt are yet more proof that the future of the Web will be all about maps, and I am waiting for Google’s new brainchild to support the iPhone so I can try it out myself.