Three Reasons Why Google Latitude is Not Sticky for Me

Google Latitude has been launched a couple of days ago, with the promise to offer users a very interesting and effective way to keep track of friends’ position and easily get in touch with them.

While it is certainly a great and innovative service and, as usual for Google, very well designed and implemented, I found myself not using it aside for one or two times when I added a couple of friends.

Why hasn’t it been sticky for me and why I don’t think I will use it so often?

1) Integration

When I’m on the go, there are some apps I use often and one is, for instance, my mobile phone’s address book. Another one? Twitter or Facebook. I use Google maps sometimes, but not so often. It would be great if I could get the position of my friends directly on my address book, with automatic alerts if some of my contacts are within a certain range.I know this could be the “next step”, but until now, I’m not going to open Google Maps on my blackberry just to see who is around. Where is the integration with my contacts on Gmail?

2) Privacy

If you manage lots of contacts (like I do), you have to take privacy really seriously. I would definitely limit the number of friends who can see where I am since it could lead to unwanted situations you still can’t imagine right now.

3) Reliability

Do I care if a friend who is living very far from me (I live in Italy, let’s say friends in the US) is at home or at the supermarket or at the office? Not really. On the contrary I would pay more attention to friends around me, but only in certain situations where I’m available for a coffee or for lunch. An example? I would have loved to have Google Latitude during my trips to the bay area since I had lots of lunches and dinner alone. The problem is that the accuracy of Google Latidude is not that great yet. The platform use both GPS and triangulation and the accuracy is not enough when it comes to rely on it for limited areas. How many times you found out that “your position” was far from been accurate on Google Maps?

By the way, how is Google using all these data? With all this amount of data, Google can easily build maps aggregated according to age, sex, job, nationality and so on. How powerful can a company by having all this important data?

I think Google offers so many useful and innovative services that (normal) people don’t really care of what Google is doing with all these data. On the contrary, they would use a service like Google Latitude if this were strictly connected to the applications they use every day and if all their friends were using it (just 10 out of my 2500 contacts are using it so far).

In conclusion, even if it’s still not sticky for me, I know that my concerns above will be sorted out soon and, of course, I look forward to it. I know it will happen, sooner or later. What about you?

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Tagged as: Global Positioning System, Google, Google Latitude, Google Map, luca filigheddu, Twitter