TAKING A FIRST LOOK at Google Latitude inside Studio Six of Tipperary Institute with the help of several creative multimedia students since the easily-installing system works well in Ireland.
Running on two Nokia handsets, the E90 and the N95, Latitude correctly found us on a map and it also found us on a map made several years ago when we looked up several names in the class. We discovered Google Latitude exposes a rich vein of SEO to be mined.
Latitude is handheld mobile information. You can discover things on the maps served by Google Latitude, then save information onto the phones as contact details. Or you can share the information via SMS, Google Talk, Gmail, or by updating your status message. You can also snap a photo on your phone and upload that image as a new profile photo on the fly.
Because Latitude is so simple, it could knock any other mobile social networking system back into the dial-up region.
We figured out how to fool Google Latitude by telling it a location where we weren't located. We also set Latitude's privacy controls so that no one could see our location. Latitude lets you change the settings on a friend-by-friend basis. By the end of our short session in Studio 6, we had acquired 10 friends. We could choose to share our GPS location, city location or hide everything, depending on the friend selected. And we could terminate Latitude's tracking capabilities easily.
You need a smart mobile phone if you want to experience the whole effect of Google Latitude. If you have a Series 60 third edition Nokia phone, you can browse google.com/latitude on your phone's web browser, download the latest version of Google Maps for mobile with Latitude, install the SIS file and activate the system with your Google log-in. Latitude is available on Blackberry, S60, and Windows Mobile, and will be available on Android in the next few days. The iPhone version, through Google Mobile App, should be available soon.
Most of the creative multimedia students in Tipperary Institute live without smartphones. Some of them have installed the Latitude iGoogle gadget and they share your locations from their laptops. I use Google Chrome and by default, I have Google Gears installed and can share my location that way too.
Google Latitude and privacy.
Brady Forrest -- "Google's Latitude adds Location-Sharing to Mobile Phones" on O'Reilly Radar, 4 Feb 09.
Neville Hobson -- "Easy Geo Location with Google Latitude"Google Mobile blog has more details.
Adrian Weckler -- "People I'm Stalking on Google Latitude" on YourTechStuff, 6 Feb 09.
