Google Latitude mainstreams social location tracking

Google Latitude is a primarily-cellphone service for sharing your current location with friends.  As such it's quite similar to the services reviewed by Mathew Honan in Wired, as well as to Google's now-discontinued Dodgeball service.  BrightKite and Yahoo's FireEagle also have aspects similar to this service, although FireEagle is more of a general infrastructure for exchanging location information.

Latitude has quite broad cellphone platform support, with versions for Android (naturally), BlackBerry, Windown Mobile 5 and S60, with iPhone and J2ME support promised.

You can get an idea of the control you have over your location info based on this screen from the site

There is also a web interface to the location info, as well as the cellphone applications.

Of course, one can also speculate that knowing in great precision where users are could also help Google in shaping hyper-local search and advertising offerings.

Search Engine Land says

Latitude is not a separate service that people need to separately adopt and configure but an extension of existing Maps for Mobile functionality. People simply need to download the latest version of Maps for their phone and opt-in to location sharing.

They also indicate that Latitude was an independent development from Dodgeball.

(Thanks to Eric Schnell for the SEL pointer.)

UPDATE: In viewing the demo, there's no indication of a time, event, friend list subset, or proximity limit option on Latitude.  I can see for example wanting to set various combinations of privacy limits - e.g. you can see my locations during the day, but not at night, or (a certain group of people) can see my location while I'm at a conference or other event, or some new contacts are allowed to see my location for a few days, but not afterwards, or you can only see my location IF you're in my friend list AND you're within a km of me.

I also don't see the "location detail" options that Fire Eagle has (for example, I might be comfortable sharing that I am in a particular city, but not my exact location within that city).

Previously:
January 26, 2009  Wired 17.02: GPS