Google Latitude to Bring Your Boring Friends Closer and Take Social Networking to the Streets
You know when you’re in the neighbourhood of one of your bottom tier friends and you’re thinking – ‘Jeeze I hope I don’t run into that motor-mouth bore!’. Well, now thanks to Google it’s unlikely you’ll ever feel that safe again. Google Latitude, a mobile friend stalking app, is launching tonight, and before you know it all your friends and family are going to be pressuring you to join it, just like Facebook, and another wonderful dimension of our personal space will dissolve as the digiverse corrodes more of our private lives.
Google Latitude is a mobile phone application that is a part of Google Maps, and everyone you have opted to shadow on the app pops up as an icon of their face on a digital map. Latitude works in 27 countries on Blackberries, Windows Mobile and Nokia S60s, and has plans to expand to the iPhone in the next couple of weeks.
Using a combination of local phone masts and Wi-Fi Internet locations to triangulate (yes, sounds CIA creepy) the user’s position, Latitude can pin you down to within metres of your current location so that, as Google product manager Hugo Barra says, you can “meet up more spontaneously with people that happen to be around.”
What Barra fails to mention is that, like other social networking apps, your failure to allow people to shadow you will be the geographical equivalent of rejecting a friend request on Facebook – i.e. a massive social rebuff that most of us, under the mammoth weight of our social guilt and anxiety, will be too afraid to make. So our Latitude app will not just include our friends, but our ex’s, distant cousins, outcast former BFF’s etc. Every time we go outside, people we don’t want to meet will be popping up from behind bushes, their mobiles in their hands like evil divining rods.
Sure, you can go “off grid” at anytime, but then people will think you’re being rude, or that you’re a depressed hermit.
DON’T YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS LEADING? IT JUST ADDS A WHOLE OTHER VARIABLE INTO THE DIGITAL MESS OF OUR SOCIAL LIVES, COMPLETE WITH ITS OWN RIDICULOUS RULES OF ETIQUETTE AND MULTIPLE OPPORTUNITIES FOR MISUNDERSTANDING AND OFFENSE.
Check it out below:
Posted by Trista Orchard in Sci-tech | February 5, 2009 11:10AM |
February 5th, 2009 at 11:30 am
[Title: Google Ocean + Google Latitude = Real-time Fishing LBS Contents]
Have you heard about Real-time Fishing LBS Contents? Real-time Fishing LBS Contents is Location Based Service for IPTV, WiMAX, Mobile. This Service Model was created in 2002 by I&IWorld. I&IWorld’s located in South Korea. As you know, there’re many people enjoy fishing in the world(about 5 hundred million). I&IWorld’s Real-time Fishing LBS Contents is like these.
[Main Functions]
1.the underwater topography and 3D views with fishing spots
2.Real-time fishing points tracing by GPS and angling direction guide
3.Service the real-time fishing condition about fishing place(weather, water temp, depth etc)
4.Angler Social network(such as Second Life)
Visit http://www.koreacontent.org/co/i/iiworld/index.html. If you need more information, please send your email address.
February 5th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Are Google employees forced to go through a voice modulation programme before they’re allowed to present these videos? It’s like being seduced by a robot (actually, that might be quite an apt description of the Google experience more generally).
February 6th, 2009 at 3:25 am
This is a very well written article. I had did not know about this application but I am glad that I am aware of it now. For sure It is something that I will never get because I agree its a violation of privacy and for sure you don’t want creepy stalkers following you aroung.
February 6th, 2009 at 4:44 am
Epic article. Well written and engaging. Normally I take in the first sentence of a technologically inclined article and move on as fast a possible. It’s good to know about this application, and how much it’s going to make life suck for those who value their privacy.
February 6th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
With real time fishing and Latitude combined you could make sure the fish are biting before joining a friend unannounced at their secret fishin’ hole.
December 3rd, 2010 at 8:00 am
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