London Calling about all things social & mobile

As many of you know, I worked in the mobile location (LBS) space for nearly 4 years while GM of Seeker Wireless, and as such I still have a real passion for the LBS space.

I have been following closely what Google have been doing with Google Mobile Maps, Google latitude, and now the Google latitude API. 

Today I read on the Google latitude site that they now have the ability to allow a badge or application to display your current location – as detected by Google mobile maps (GMM).

This is significant, because now bloggers and developers can use the power of Google’s massive location platform (with a user’s permission) to start to do some really smart things with location and LBS.   In just 5 minutes, I was able to knock up a page with a google map of my current location using the code on the latitude API apps site (see an example above).

One question remains – why would I want my public location available to everyone?  Well firstly I have nothing to hide, and I also have complete control at both the GMM mobile application level as well as the latitude API website level to set what level of detail I share about my current location (accurate street address, suburb, city, state or country level).

Also, as an LBS advocate, I am keen to promote discussion around the valuable uses of live and historic location.  It is a pity that the Google API does not integrate with Yahoo! Fire eagle but perhaps that will come in the future.

Previously, I was using blogloc, a very cool java app that takes your current GPS location and publishes it to fire eagle as well as a blog badge via Google maps.  The problem was however that the blogloc java app required me to manually fire it up, and sync my location each time – and then only when I had a GPS fix. 

The brilliance of the Google mobile application with latitude is that because of their massive Cell-ID and WiFi database, even if I am inside Google returns a location fix of reasonable accuracy. 

Also you can run GMM in the background and have it update my location while on the move.

I’ve set up as short URL http://tr.im/loc8 which redirects to the page showing my current location and it is also mobile friendly – delivering a mobile sized map if it detects you are on a mobile browser.

So…have a look at my current location if you need to know where I am before you call me or contact me and let’s see if this extension to Google latitude helps drive the adoption of always on/auto location LBS services.

Well done Google team – once again you have introduced a step-change to the mobile location space.   Now it is over to the mobile developers to harness this significant resource for mobile advertising and mobile social networking.

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