Google Latitude adds location history and alerts

Google announced the addition of Location History and Location Alerts to its Latitude mobile friend-finder service, enabling users to keep track of their movement over time as well as receive notices when their contacts are in the immediate vicinity. According to Google, Location History stores, views and manages past Latitude locations--users may visualize their history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order, or else delete their selected history or entire location history at any time. As for Location Alerts, "we realized it wasn't as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other," software engineer Chris Lambert writes on the Official Google Mobile Blog. "Imagine that you're Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time." Lambert adds it can take Latitude as long as a week to determine each user's "unusual" locations and start sending alerts.

Google introduced Latitude in February 2009--the opt-in service enables smartphone users to triangulate the whereabouts of family and friends, offering the approximate location of contacts who decide to share their activities. In addition, Latitude allows users to communicate via SMS, Google Talk, Gmail or status update, as well as upload new profile photos on the fly. Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra later said that more than a million subscribers signed up for Latitude in its first week of availability. An iPhone-optimized version of Latitude running as a Safari-based web application debuted in July.

For more on the Latitude enhancements:
- read this Official Google Mobile Blog entry