Google released Latitude earlier this year as a location-based service (LBS) that competes with Brightkite and Loopt.Last month the Latitude arrvied to the Android phones, it is now available as an iPhone web app — because Apple didn’t want it as a native app.
Google Latitude web app provides all the core functionality you might expect: you can see the location of your friends on a map and modify your privacy settings so that you control how your location is shared and with whom. In fact, if my friends and colleagues back in London haven’t yet noticed my absence, they’ll see in Latitude that I’m currently vacationing on the beach in Australia. Hi guys, remember me!?
You’ll also find basic Search and Directions functionality to help you get around the world. And just like our Google Maps for mobile client apps (and more recently on desktop Google Maps), you can press the “blue dot” to be taken to your approximate current location on the map with My Location, thanks to Safari now supporting the W3C Geolocation API.
How to use? To try Google Latitude, type google.com/latitude into your iPhone’s browser. And if you miss the experience of launching the app directly from your home screen, you can add a bookmark to the home screen by opening Latitude in Safari and tapping the
+ icon > Add to Home Screen > Add.
Google originally developed Latitude for iPhone as a native app, and Apple shot it down. “Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.”
Thanks to Safari’s newfound access to the iPhone’s GPS hardware in OS 3.0, Latitude works pretty well as a web app in our quick testing. But Apple’s request of Google to rewrite Latitude as a web app must have been no small feat. This probably explains why Latitude arrived for just Android last month, instead of simultaneously for the iPhone, as has been Google’s typical behavior so far.
