A little over a week ago Google Latitude launched, a location-based service that marries up smart phones with the web to track your location and find your friends (which looks suspiciously like an exact clone of InSTEDD’s SMS GeoChat by the way). It’s a mobile social network with a focus on location. See my earlier thoughts on microblogging and crisis, and the official Google blog post on it.
What Google has done, instead of just building another social network, is use their existing “My Location” and other tools to enable people on Maps for Mobile to share their location with a selective group of contacts — those who opt-in to participate.
This is more innovative and will have a larger impact than most people understand just yet. It’s big, primarily because it’s not a “specialized for humanitarian efforts” application – it’s made for everyone, all the time, which means it is more likely to be used when an emergency strikes.
As Sanjana Hattotuwa says:
“Potential uses for this for real time election violence monitoring, IDPs and refugee movement tracking, Human Rights and Ceasefire monitoring, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief and disaster management are impressive and beg to be explored.”
Just today, Google announced that they already have 1 million users in 27 countries. That’s fairly impressive, and it will grow as they have specific communities that adopt the service. It will also grow when an emergency strikes and people “turn it on” for their Google account. Basically, a million people have turned it on out of curiosity, what happens when you give the rest a real reason?
Make no mistake, this is Google’s quiet “Ace” and it’s a killer app. Nokia, Facebook, Twitter and the rest would do well not to ignore it.
My question: can outside services play with this? Is there going to be an API or web service?
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You might like this thread from Matt Jones on the hereish and nowish of location: http://magicalnihilism.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/exporting-the-past-into-the-future-or-the-possibility-jelly-lives-on-the-hypersurface-of-the-present/
Okay, just buried myself in that post Jan. I tend to agree with Matt on the ambiguity of on location/time being (possibly more) useful for certain types of interactions. Of course, with my Ushahidi hat on, I think of this in terms of crisis/disaster/emergency – which is very much as near real-time, and as accurate as makes sense to use, as you can get.
As much as I love the hereish and nowish, when it come to locating my daughter in an earthquake, I want it exact.
Here’s a quick mockup showing what precise location awareness would give us (especially when combined with a crowdsourced “crisis graph” of data.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/unthinkingly/3293576119/
Unfortunately, since the debut, I’ve only been able to access the desktop application. When I try to access on my iPhone, I just get a landing page that says “Coming Soon”. Hopefully that coming soon will be sooner than later. I think the app could have real potential, but I haven’t been able to really play around with it while I’m out.
Continuing the Discussion