Google Latitude and Yahoo FireEagle
At Skydeck we’ve been playing around with Google Latitude, the new feature of Google Maps for mobile phones that allows you to share your location with friends.
The Latitude idea has been floating around for years, but … it’s very hard to do well on one model of cell phone; there are actually hundreds of different kinds; there is no obvious revenue model; cell phone and Internet companies cannot agree on how to split the non-obvious revenue; and privacy advocates think the whole idea is insane. Google has cut through all of this by ignoring revenue for now, spending a fortune to build clients for many different kinds of phones as well as systems that can figure out the location of those phones without the help of cell phone companies, and promising to do no evil.
It works really well. If you connect to me, I can see where you are at all times. No more “I’m here – where are you?” phone calls. At a sprawling conference in Barcelona, the Skydeck team were able to keep track of each other and co-ordinate meetings. And my wife knows when I am on my way home.
But I don’t want or need to know where all my friends are all of the time. I’d just like to know when they are one block over. Sometimes.
Right now I can only share my location with other users of Latitude inside Latitude, and that gets old, fast. I want to share my location with lots of other applications and people from time to time. When I call a cab, I’d like to show the driver where I’m standing. When I’m late for a meeting, I’d like to show the other person how far away I am. I’d like to log my location in a calendar, so that at the end of the year I have a diary of all the places that I’ve been. When I arrive in a new city, I’d like to update my status automatically, and I’d like to share my location with other applications on my phone.
As it happens, Yahoo has built a terrific platform for sharing location information called FireEagle. FireEagle controls who sees what when, so that the cab driver can know exactly where I am but only for the next 10 minutes while my friends on Facebook can always know where I am, but only the city. Right now there is no way that I can report my location automatically to FireEagle; I have to update it by hand. And that gets old, fast.
So Google and Yahoo, please connect Latitude to FireEagle. That won’t get old at all.
(Why does Skydeck care about Latitude? Because we want to add location data to Skydeck. Because we need background processing before we can offer full support for the iPhone, and Apple has to deliver background processing if they want Google Latitude. Because we’re geeks.)