Google Lattitude and other location services

I use a few location services.

  • Dopplr to record my travels. You can see them all on the MyTravels section of the site
  • Brightkite. Because it is a nice little mobile connection and has connections out but I’m not using it a lot at the moment. It won’t take a feed from Dopplr, but will feed into that service.
  • Fireeagle. Simple, all it does it record where you are and then act as a hu to other services. I like it to use it like that, at the centre of things, but not everything is quite there yet with the other services.
  • Google Lattitude. I’ve just started using, especially the mobile version, and quite like it.

I’ve been playing around with all the services over the last week and have been thinking about ways I’d like to add some control. I’m not a power user of these in anyway, but like to just play around with them

  • Connectivity. Google is particularly bad, it does not appear to have any. From past experience, it’ll likely be a while before it does. What I’d like to be able to do is have Fireeagle as the hub and be able to control and feed in and out from the other services. I’m likely to drop Brightkite if Google had this – I only need one mobile version.
  • Location Setting. Latitude allows you to decide to set your location manually or automatically. But it only has this per account, I’d like to be able to do this per device. I’d like anything from the computer to be set manually and anything from a mobile device to be automatic (well usually)
  • Granualarity. Fireeagle allows you to tell other services your location at different levels – exact, area, city. Google seemed to miss that nicety, in allowing you to define who can see what. Every service should have the ability to fuzz things.
  • Exclusion zones. I’d like to be able to set exclusion zones, so that a service will never display you at certain points (like personal addresses). When I start to approach these zones, the location becomes fuzzy, moving around a bit. I’d like to be able to turn this on at a click of a button – say if I’m visiting somewhere. I may tweet that I’m with someone but want to be able to fuzz out the location.

I think that will do for now.

One thought on “Google Lattitude and other location services

  1. I work on crisis software so I’m a little preoccupied with earthquakes and stuff, but what if you could set it to automatically switch on “let everybody know where I am” mode in an emergency? I think that would be useful … like this:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/unthinkingly/3293576119/

    We can work with the city to get emergency updates so you would know about bad stuff really quickly through a mobile app.