Google Latitude trial notes

Last Friday, Google released a much-anticipated location tracking service: latitude. This Service uses the built-in GPS of smartphones (such as Google Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile) to locate your current location and share it with friends. Robert Strohmeyer wrote an article in PC world to share his Google Latitude trial note. For more information about latitude, see if Google Latitude can become the killer of all mobile social networks?

Web Registration

If you have a Google account, you can directly add the latitude service in igoogle, and use the mouse and keyboard to add your friend list, you can also use a smartphone to access google.com/latitude and download the latest Google mobile app, which has the built-in latitude function.

Add friends

Before getting started, you need to add a list of friends who want to share location information with yourself. Gmail users can directly select from their contacts, or manually add them.

After a friend list is added, their icons are displayed on Google
In the map, you can click their icon or view the list to know how long ago they just updated their location information. If they do not enter their location information or do not enable GPS
Tracking. Their names will show unknown locations. In some cases, a small eye icon is displayed next to your friend, with a diagonal line. It seems that they have hidden their positions. In fact, it is the opposite.
You can select this friend and choose the level of location information you want to share with him.

Privacy

You have three options to share your location. You can enable latitude to detect your location and share it automatically, manually enter your location, or hide it completely. These options are placed under the "privacy" menu. This setting is valid for all contacts. However, you can set different privacy options for each friend separately.

Because you can manually enter any location information, you can easily set a false location. For example, you can pretend to be a great guy and say that you are driving a private plane in Timbuktu in Mali to enjoy the exotic scenery.

Mobile latitude

The mobile version of the latitude interface varies with handheld devices. The following are based on BlackBerry Curve.

Google mobile & maps

In Blackberry, latitude is built into the Google mobile program and can be downloaded at www.google.com/mobile. Even if you have installed Google mobile and Google map before, you still need to download the latest version.

In the Google mobile program, select maps from the menu. If your Google Maps version is used, the system will prompt you to download a new upgrade.

At first, the latitude is not enabled. You need to click the menu button and select "latitude" to enable it. Enter the username and password of your Google account, and add a list of friends on the web interface as mentioned earlier.

Mobile friends list

The friend list of the mobile version is the same as that of the web version, but a part of the list will be dropped because the screen is small. They are floating on the map.

To add a new friend, click "add friend by menu" at the top of the friend menu to go to the interface where you can access the same contact list as that on the Web interface, you can also manually add it. To avoid searching for hundreds of users, you can use the "common contacts" option.

Friend options

If you want to set a friend's option separately, you can select a friend in the friend list and press the Enter key to activate the context menu. Here you can obtain the location information of a friend, you can also find the desired item near your current location, adjust the privacy level, or delete the contact.

Satellite map and traffic map

Because it is built in Google Maps, latitude contains the same traffic map and satellite map functions.

Through the traffic map, you can know whether your friends who are about to meet will arrive on time. Check the red lines between you to see that the traffic on those routes is crowded. If they are all green lines, your friend has no reason to be late.

Problems

Latitude is a brand new service, and there is no problem at all, but it is difficult to tell which problems are the problems of the latitude system and which are caused by insufficient GPS power supply on the mobile phone. Mobile phones have many GPS problems, which often lead to inaccurate GPS identification.

Therefore, it is not surprising that latitude often reports inconsistent location information. In actual use, my friend sometimes shows a few blocks, sometimes a few miles away. In the same way, I often change my position, which is displayed at home, 5 blocks away from the east, or a mile away from the West.

Conclusion: latitude is an impressive little tool that is very useful for keeping in touch with friends, but it is not very precise. Of course, many people do not like to expose their privacy. Therefore, this deviation may not matter.

International Source: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/159137/google_latitude_an_indepth_look.html
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