14 DAY TRIAL // Location-based services are becoming increasingly popular as more mobile devices get GPS features and people are less concerned about their privacy. There are a couple of hot startups, like Foursquares, catering to this space, but Google has now updated its own similar service Latitude with a couple of new features, Location History and Alerts, which could prove very interesting once you've passed the creepiness factor.
“One of the most popular ideas was for Latitude to keep track of location history, allowing you (but not your friends) to see where you've been at any point in time. Another popular idea was to notify you when you're near your Latitude friends so you can easily meet up or grab lunch. Today, we're happy to introduce both Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (beta) to let you do even more with Latitude,” Chris Lambert, a software engineer at Google Mobile, wrote about the feature request Google's been getting.
With Location History, users can see all of the places they've visited over time. The feature isn't enabled by default, for obvious reasons, but if active, it records all of the locations you've been to. It also allows you to manage those locations, remove the ones you don't necessarily want to keep or even the entire history. The locations can only be viewed by you, but you could share individual ones with your friends just like any other location in Google Maps.
The other big feature is Alerts which Google says is still in beta. The idea is simple, with Alerts enabled Latitude will notify you whenever one of your friends is in the area, making it really useful for chance encounters. But in order to not get swamped with alerts anytime you go to the office, the feature uses a bit of cunning to determine which are your regular locations. After it has learned the places you usually hang around, which may take up to a week, the feature will start sending you notifications every time a friend is near, in an unusual location or at an unusual time for that location. The feature requires Location History to be enabled. The only downside, at the moment, is that iPhone users can't take full advantage of it as the app has been rejected by Apple, so Latitude is only available through the website.