Something Amazing

Challenge 3 of the contest is to demonstrate how my favorite app makes my life more easier or fun. I’ve chosen to Google Latitude as my app to review, which is essentially a live location-tracking service for Google maps. Many of my cohorts opted to make a video describing their app, but I thought a video wouldn’t be the best platform to get the word across.

Latitude looks like this:

The icon at the bottom of the screen is me, and the other icons are where my friends are at. Latitude comes included with all Android handsets, and can also be downloaded for BlackBerry OS, iPhone, Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile. Here’s some uses I have concocted for Google Latitude!

Catching your partner cheating

Suspect your partner is cheating on you? No problem! No need to hire a private investigator and pay hundreds of dollars an hour, just buy her a new Android handset outright, help her “set it up”, add yourself to her Latitude account and off you go! Real-time tracking! So when she’s staying back for work and you see that she’s actually 30km away at 28 Shifty Drive, grab your baseball bat/gun and go for a drive. You’ll have the satisfaction of bursting in on her, clubbing the other man in the face, and you’ll be saving hundreds of dollars in private investigator fees!

Tracking Pizza Delivery

Okay, this one isn’t realistic, but I did actually use it for this purpose once. I was over a mates house and waiting for his housemate (my friend too) to bring home the motherload of pizza from his shift at Domino’s. We were a little drunk and a lot hungry, and anxious to know when he’d arrive. Then I remembered I had him on latitude! So I opened latitude up and we tracked his progress, all the way up the freeway to the apartment doorstep. Maybe Dominos should look into using the Latitude API to further improve their online pizza-tracking experience?

Locating friends out and about

Newer versions of Latitude contain a “real-time updating” feature that allow you to tap on their icon to get near real-time indications of where they are at. Normally, there will be several minutes between your Latitude updates (depending on your use of the phone, settings enabled, etc), enabling this option will make it near-instant. So if you’re out and about, have agreed to meet up with Johnny X and have no idea you actually are, just hit him up on Latitude!

Better yet, you can scope out Latitude to see which of your friends are out and about on the night! 

Locating Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden recently made the mistake of accepting unitedstatesmilitary@gmail.com to his Latitude friends list. Even the world’s hide and seek champion makes mistakes every now and again..

Overall I think Latitude is a really cool concept; as more and more people start getting Android phones, the ubiquity of the application should increase. There’s great opportunity to do real-cool things with something like this, and Google has made an API interface available to the public to program with, so there’s a good chance somebody is going to make something very, very cool and exciting out of this. If you’ve got an Android handset you can access Latitude very easily by opening Google Maps, pressing the menu key on your handset, and hitting Latitude. Stalking Ahoy!