Google is not lagging too far behind on anything these days. We like the design of Android and it’s reaching far ahead into the cloud, which could be a new cornerstone of computing… but for now—something gaining a lot of attention is location-based services (LBS), which helps friends network and find each other based on their location—Foursquare and Loopt are prime examples of these growing networks.
Google has it’s own called Latitude which now tracks location history, and alerts you to nearby friends. Today, the search giant announced some major additions to Latitude that bring it in line with its fast-rising competitors (Loopt and Foursquare).
Location history is fairly straightforward: Google will store all of your past locations and will use that information to create visual histories of your trips and adventures via Google Maps. If you take a bike ride across Indiana for example, you can track the route you took along with the times in which you arrived.
The other feature is Google Location Alerts, which sends you notifications when your friends are nearby via email or SMS. To make sure you don’t get a text every time you go to work and see your Google Latitude-using co-workers, Latitude utilizes your location history to eliminate notifications when you’re in a location you regularly visit. It even incorporates time, so if you’re at work but at 3 AM, you’ll get notifications once again.
So—Latitude has an Android app, but it doesn’t have an iPhone equivalent, just a mobile site. This leaves Latitude without the ability to send push notifications, a major reason why Foursquare has been a red-hot product. For Latitude to make deeper inpact, it needs an iPhone app. There is a big difference to the user when they download an app versus opening it up in the mobile web. It could even automatically send your location utilizing the same method that Loopt is testing. Google could turn into an even stronger competitor in the LBS space.
Whether Apple would cave into Google pressure is, of course, another matter, and they’ve told Google that they didn’t want a Latitude app, however things have changed in the relationship between the two companies—and it could be possible that Google and Apple could work together on this one.
www.google.com/mobile/products/latitude.html
