Google Latitude on Android RC33

Posted on | February 7, 2009 | 1 Comment

Google Latitude, which was introduced earlier this week and is expected to be rolled out (at least in the US) on Android via the RC33 upgrade (this is not cupcake!) from February 5th to 15th, might be a game changer in mobile, geo-aware social networking.  Google describes Latitude as…

…a new feature of Google Maps for mobile, as well as an iGoogle gadget, that allows you to share your location with your friends and to see their approximate locations, if they choose to share them with you. You can use your Google account to sign in and easily invite friends to Latitude from your existing list of contacts or by entering their email addresses. Google Talk is integrated with Latitude, so you and your friends can update your status messages and profile photos on the go and see what everyone is up to. You can also call, SMS, IM, or email each other within the app. 

granted, there are plenty of geo-aware social networks, mostly on the iPhone-platform (loopt, Moximity etc. – TechCrunch has excellent coverage of this space), but most of them are either  restricted to a single hardware-platform, don’t work outside the US, or force users to rebuild their contacts/friends within yet another online service. Altitude on the other hand, will soon be available on every major platform (iPhone, Android, S60, Windows Mobile, J2ME, BlackBerry) and can leverage the social graph associated with your Google account.

if you’re on RC30 and don’t want to wait until RC33 is pushed to your phone, there are plenty of tutorials on the upgrade-process (check MobileCrunch for english, Mobinauten.de for german instructions). unfortunately, us Mobilebloggers will have to wait with the upgrade, since the austrian G1’s run under a different build…

 

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