Ryan Boswell [dot] com
Google Latitude
Earlier this week, Google launched the Latitude iPhone app. I’m pretty excited about the app because it’ll finally give me a chance to really use Latitude, since before I had to consciously go to the Latitude website and update my location, which defeats the purpose of a persistent-location service and makes it no better or different from checkin-based location services.
Persistent Location
I think persistent-location is a useful tool for personal use, I like the idea of being able to look through my history and see where I’ve been or where I went on a given day. However, I’m not very comfortable with other people having that information, even if they are my friends. One of the blog posts I read about the subject in the wake of the release argues that while persistent-location has it’s merits, a better method of implementing it would be of highlighting more unique locations that you visit (after you’ve built up a history of your regular haunts) and “checking” you in to those locations rather than providing an open stream of your movements throughout the day. I really like this use of the location data, because I don’t want to think about noting that I am somewhere, I want my phone to do that for me, or at least pushing me a notification asking if I want to checkin to a location I just arrived at so I can choose and then forget about it rather than remembering an hour later “Oh yeah, I should checkin here”.
Latitude
After two full days of using Latitude (leaving it running with background updating turned on), I have to say that I do like it, but it definitely has some kinks to work out.
Google provides a really nice interface for viewing your location history. It’s a map of all the location within the date range you give (defaulted to the most recent time-span) with markers of all the locations it recorded you at. On the left side is an ordered list of all of these locations with timestamps of when they were recorded.
Possibly the coolest feature in this is the play button. Clicking it will “play” through your movements, moving along the map from marker to marker in the order you visited them. Kind of a location replay.
However, there is one small problem with all of this. Several of the locations it recorded were off. Most were fairly accurate (within a block or so of my actual location), but at it’s worst it was half a mile away from where I actually was (for example, my history says I was on a mountain nearby when I’m pretty sure I was sitting in Starbucks coding, not that I’m complaining about the appearance of being active while I’m really sipping down my second eggnog latte of the day). You can remove markers from your history (either to remove an erroneous location, or hide that you had gone somewhere), either individually or for an entire day or time span, which can be useful. The problem is that this is most likely due to inaccurate GPS locations that the iPhone provides Latitude, which means it’s not a problem Google can readily fix.
One other interesting feature is the distance progress bar.
It totals your distance traveled since you started using Latitude and shows it as a progress bar of how far you need to travel to reach the Moon, a creative and interesting method of displaying that information.
I would talk about their dashboard, but unfortunately I don’t have enough usage data for them to display in the dashboard. Google recommends that I check back in 1-2 weeks and I should see something. So I might update then if there’s anything worth writing about.
Overall I really do like Latitude, and I’m definitely going to continue using it for my own personal use and records. The service definitely has promise in the future with a few minor tweaks, but I really doubt that I’ll be sharing any of my location data with friends, at least with how it works now.