GoMo Buzz Watch: everyone goes crazy over Google Latitude

The release of Google’s new mobile tracking app, Latitude, caused some sort of explosion on the Internet yesterday. Everyone and their sister had something to say about the new service. There are a huge number of blogs and articles about the service out there, so we decided to gather the best ones here.

“Kinda creepy, kinda cool”

The general consensus is that while Latitude is a great service, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. If you somehow managed to miss what it does, Latitude is a mobile application that uses GPS and mobile cell towers to figure out your location. It then pinpoints you on Google maps, and shows you the location of friends and family. It’s an opt-in service, so nobody can see you without your permission.

Blogs on the topic ranged from purely informative, to extremely suspicious, to thoroughly tested. Here’s a list of what I felt were the most informative and useful blogs in each of those categories:

Informative: Techcrunch - Broadcast your location to friends with google latitude

Suspicious: PCWorld - Three reasons I won’t be using latitude

Tested: Wall Street Journal - Tacking friends the Google way

and honorable mention for a good podcast discussion goes to Stephen Shanklands appearance on Cnet

What we think?

Latitude is arriving pretty late to the game. Location-based apps like Loopt and Where have been doing this for a while now. It’s a sad fact, but the mobile space is so difficult to advertise in that a lot of people didn’t really think about tracking services until someone as big as Google did it. “Kinda creepy, kinda cool” has been the opinion on these services since they popped up. I can only presume that Latitude will see quite a bit of use, as it integrates the service into the Google Maps feature that most people already use. Way to swoop in and claim the credit, Google.