Google had a cool feature as part of Location History: a dashboard that displayed how you spend your time, how much do you spend at work or at home, the places you've visited, when you visited each country, your flights, the distance you've traveled (including the number of additional miles to the Moon). This feature, which was launched in 2010 as part of Google Latitude and was still in beta, is gone and the dashboard redirects to the Location History homepage.

Google confirmed that the feature was removed last month: "You can continue to view and manage your Location History information by going to https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/, but we've removed the Location History dashboard (the part of the Location History website that provided a summary of your locations, including total miles traveled and trip information). We are not removing Location History entirely or deleting any raw Location History information. We're continuing to explore more useful and relevant ways for you to engage with and view location history."

Here are some screenshots from Bogdan Bele and guao.hk:



And here are the remaining features:


For some people, the dashboard was one of the main reasons to enable Location History. "I thought the dashboard was a nice record of my travels, and it was the only reason I activated location reporting on my Android phone. If the dashboard has permanently disappeared, then it means that Google is tracking my location for their own purposes, and not giving me anything in return," says Rob Fuller, a reader of this blog.

Location History is actually used by some Google Now cards. "Google Now uses your Location History, which may include locations saved from your use of other Google products, to monitor traffic on your commute route and more," informs Google. There's even a card that shows a summary of your activity. Google Maps also uses it to personalize search results.


{ Thanks, Rob. }

Joe LaPenna, from Google, wrote an interesting post on Google+ about Google Latitude and the future of location sharing. He worked on Google Latitude for 5 years and he'll take Latitude offline in one month.

"We're still working on location sharing and I'm still really happy with G+ Location. Its a rewrite of the Latitude stack but built for a world where social is a layer across all of the Google experience, not just deposited in a corner of Google Maps. In a month, when Latitude goes dark, we'll have G+ Location there, ready for us (Android is ready, iOS is on its way). And what's better is you can share your location with the people that you care about, they can see it on a map and they don't even have to do a single thing. No invites. No emails and links and websites and hooha. They just open G+ click on Location and see your happy face," says Joe.

After unfriending all the 140 people contacts from Google Latitude and switching to Google+ location sharing, Joe noticed something striking: "I don't see as many people on the map as I did before but the difference is quickly and steadily shrinking. I definitely see more people I care about now (three months after G+ Location launched) than I did right after Latitude launched. This whole process really made me aware and confident that building anew was the right thing."

I think it makes sense to move Google Latitude to Google+. Having a separate list of friends you have to manage made sense before Google+ was released, but now it's cumbersome and unnecessary. What doesn't make sense is Google's migration path: instead of adding Google Latitude's features to Google+ and providing a way to import your Google Latitude friends, Google discontinued Latitude and announced everyone that the list of friends will be deleted. Oh, and there's a Google+ location sharing feature, but it only shows a map in the Android app and you'll have to find a way to enable it and add your contacts. Why not automate my instructions from this post and why not discontinue Latitude when there's a decent replacement in all Google+ flavors?


{ via Search Engine Roundtable }

Google Latitude has been discontinued and a help center article offers more information about this. Unfortunately, there's something inaccurate: "you can't export your friend information out of Latitude".

Well, you can export your Latitude friends because they're added to a hidden Gmail group. Here's how to do that:

1. go to this Google Contacts page

2. select all contacts

3. click "More", then "Export" and click the "Export" button. You'll get a CSV file with all your Latitude friends.


4. (optional) import the contacts to Google+ and use location sharing - Google's Latitude replacement. Go to the People section in Google+, click "connect services" in the left sidebar, select "open address book" and pick the CSV file you've exported. You'll get a list of people you can add to a new Google+ circle (let's call it Latitude). Enable location sharing at the bottom of this page and restrict it to the circle you've created: pick "Custom" and select the Latitude circle. Unfortunately, Google only shows location data on profile pages and in the Locations section of the Google+ app for Android, but that may change in the future.


"Google Latitude will be retired on August 9th, 2013. Products being retired include Google Latitude in Google Maps for Android, Latitude for iPhone, the Latitude API, the public badge, the iGoogle Gadget, and the Latitude website at maps.google.com/latitude. We'll delete your list of friends on Latitude. You won't be able to see or manage friends. Any existing friends will no longer see your location in Google Maps for mobile on Android, Latitude for iPhone, the public badge, the iGoogle Gadget, and the Latitude website at maps.google.com/latitude, if you continue to use these products," says Google.

Location History will continue to be available, since it's used by Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Now. "Google Location History is an opt-in feature that allows you to store your past Google location history and see it on a Google Map or in Google Earth. Your Location History is visible only to you." Location Reporting will also be available, since it "allows Google to periodically store and use your device's most recent location data in connection with your Google Account".

Google Latitude is useful if you want to share your location with a group of friends, but not everyone wants to do that. As Foursquare's success showed, people want to manually "check in" and only share some of the places they visit.

To make Google Latitude more useful and to better integrate it with other social services, Google added support for check-ins. "You can still use Latitude to automatically update and share your location, but check-ins let you add context to the location — like captions to a photo," explains Google. It's an opportunity to improve Google Maps by sharing your favorite places, which could also make social recommendations better.


Check-ins connect locations to places and they're better suited for sharing because there's no real-time tracking involved. Google says that check-ins will be added to your Google Buzz stream and you can share them with your friends, make them public or private. There are some additional features that help you use check-ins: notifications to check in at a nearby place once you arrive, automatic check-ins at specific places, the option to check out and status level (visitor/Regular/VIP/Guru). Google Places pages include information about your check-ins, your friends' check-ins and your status.

Check-ins are supposed to work if you use the latest version of Google Maps for Android. If you use an iPhone, you should see a new version of the Latitude app in the near future. I've installed Google Maps 5.1 for Android, but I couldn't find the new features.


Google says that there are 10 million active Latitude users. Check-ins could attract new users and make Google's social services more popular.

Ironically, check-ins were made popular by Foursquare, a startup created by Dodgeball's founder and former Google employee Dennis Crowley. Dennis quit Google two years after Google acquired Dodgeball. "The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn't convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space."

{ Thanks, Michael. }

Google has finally released a native iPhone app for Google Latitude. The web app is nice, but you can't use it to update your location in the background. Google Latitude for iPhone uses one of the new features in iOS 4 that allows applications to track your location even if they aren't in the foreground. That's the main reason why it requires an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPad 3G running iOS 4. (Update: According to Google, "the Google Latitude app will run on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, and iPod touch (3rd/4th generation). However, background location updating is only supported on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPad 3G.")


The native app is better because it shows more information about the locations of your friends and it sends you to the map view when you click on a friend, but the web app is just a layer in Google Maps and this makes a lot of sense. Google Latitude should not be a standalone app, it should integrate with Google Maps and Google Contacts, so you can quickly find your friends.


Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of geographic and local services, has recently said that Google Latitude will add explicit check-ins, inspired by Foursquare. "Latitude is useful for a smaller group of people. Only a handful of people you'll want to know where you are at all times. There will be new layers coming on top of it. It's more useful when more people are on it. And implicit and explicit — yes, the check-in. Maybe that's in Latitude or maybe it's in Maps."

Until recently, the only way to use Google Latitude on your computer was to add an iGoogle gadget. Now you can just go to www.google.com/latitude and see your Latitude friends on a map, add friends, view your Latitude history and change the settings for other applications that use your location.


If you use a browser that supports geolocation (Chrome 5+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 5+, Opera 10.6+) or a plug-in that adds support for geolocation (Google Toolbar, Google Gears), you can share your location. "Automatic location detection requires wireless access or access to a WiFi access point," explains Google.

Hopefully, Google will also launch a desktop site for Google Tasks, so you can quickly check your to-do list without opening Gmail, Google Calendar or iGoogle.

{ via Google LatLong }

Google's contact manager doesn't include built-in groups for Google Chat friends or for the people you follow in Google Buzz. Fortunately, you can easily create a group for the people you follow in Google Buzz using a clever trick found by Siegfried Hirsch:

1. Go to Gmail's contact manager and search for http://www.google.com/profiles. Here's the URL for the search results.

2. Select all the results, click on the "Groups" drop-down and then on the "Create new" option.

3. Create a new group called "Buzz".

This works because Google automatically adds each Google Buzz user you follow to your contacts list and also includes the address of the Google Profile. If you've manually removed Google Profile address or added Google Profile addresses to other contacts, the results won't accurately reflect your Google Buzz group. Obviously, the group won't update automatically when you follow/unfollow Google Buzz users.


Google could use a lot of information from other services to enrich Google Contacts: the photos you tag in Picasa Web Albums, information and links from Google Profiles, Google Latitude location, the most recent Google Buzz message, but that will probably happen when Google Me is released.

Google Latitude added two new applications that make location tracking more useful: history and alerts.

Google Latitude History stores your locations and lets you visualize them on a map. You can remove some of the locations and export the history to a KML file. At the moment, you are the only one who can access your location history.

A more interesting application is Google Latitude Alerts, that "lets you receive and send alert notifications if Google Latitude friends are nearby when you're somewhere interesting or unusual. Alerts use Location History to send notifications only when they're most likely to be interesting to you and your nearby friends."

Google Latitude Alerts tries to be smart by only sending notifications when you're at an unusual location or when you're at a familiar place at an unusual time.

For some reason, enabling Google Latitude Alerts has an unexpected side-effect: "your nearby Latitude friends each receive an alert notification email that you are nearby, even if they haven't yet enabled Location Alerts. Alerts notify friends where you usually are on that day and time to explain why your location is unusual and the alert was sent."

Both applications are opt-in, so you need to explicitly enable them. Unfortunately, even if you don't enable alerts, you may still receive notifications from your friends. To disable the notifications, visit this page and click on "Opt out of notifications from friends".

{ via Google Mobile blog }

If you want to display the location from Google Latitude on your Google profile, follow these steps:

* set your location using the iGoogle gadget or the mobile application.

* enable the public location badge, by selecting "Enable and show city-level only" or "Enable and show best available location". You should be aware that your location is now publicly available and it can displayed in a variety of ways using Google's API.

* edit your profile and select "Display my Latitude location". Google mentions that "your location appears on your profile, below your name, occupation, and city where you live, as long as you've updated it on Latitude within the last 24 hours."

In other news, Google started to show rich snippets for the results from Google Profiles. Google extracts structured data about jobs from profiles.

Google Latitude started as a service that managed to obtain your location and shared it with a group of people, who also revealed their locations. The service was available as part of the mobile Google Maps application or as an iGoogle gadget.

To make the information stored in Google Latitude more useful, you can now display it on a web page, in a feed or add it as a constantly-updated Google Talk status. The location can be added to a badge and embedded on any web page, but there's also an option to get a list of the most recent locations as a KML or JSON feed. Since you may not want to share your precise location, Google Latitude has an option to display the city-level location.


If you only want to share your location with the Google Talk contacts, enable the new location status. The feature "automatically updates your status message with your current city's name as you move".

It's interesting to notice that the two new features are actually applications and it's likely that Google Latitude will implement an API that could be used by other location-based services, much like Yahoo's Fire Eagle. "They are two separate apps, so you can select which one(s) you'd like to use and customize exactly how you'd like to share your Latitude location. (...) Both apps adhere to the same terms and conditions -- you must explicitly opt in to the application and of course, you can always disable an app by going back to the app's page," explains Google.

"Apps use the same location as the Google Latitude location tied to your Google Account. While Latitude is enabled and updating your location from your mobile phone or iGoogle where available, your apps will show your most recently updated location. If you simply stop updating your location from your phone or computer by closing iGoogle, letting your phone run out of battery, turn your phone off, etc., your last updated or manually set location will still be visible in your other apps, even if it's old," informs the help center.

The location from Google Latitude, which is obtained from a variety of sources (GPS, cell towers, WiFi location), could be used in many applications: better local results in Google Search, easier to use GOOG-411, viewing your routes in Google Maps, customized geo-alerts and probably other useful-but-somewhat-creepy services.

The latest version of Google Maps for Mobile adds a new feature that lets you share your location with friends and see their locations in real-time. Google Latitude is the first step for adding more social features to Google Maps and to other Google services.

"How often do you find yourself wondering where your friends are and what they're up to? It's a pretty central question to our daily social lives, and it's precisely the question you can now answer using Google Latitude," explains Google's blog.


After installing Google Maps Mobile 3.0 (only available for Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 right now), you can share your location automatically or set your location manually. You can also post a short status and choose a profile photo.


Here's the complete list of things you can do using Latitude:

After selecting yourself, you can:
- Change your status message across Google products. Your status will only be shared with your current Google Talk or Gmail chat friends.
- Change your photo across Google products.
- Submit or edit your phone number in Latitude for your friends.
- Edit your privacy settings for all friends.

After selecting a friend, you can:
- Show the friend in map view.
- Search for places near your friend.
- Call if a phone number is available in your Google Contacts or Latitude.
- Chat using Google Talk or Gmail chat if available.
- Send an email.
- Get directions to the friend's approximate location.
- Set sharing options. You can choose to hide your location or share only city level location with individual friends.
- Remove the friend. Your friend cannot see your location and you cannot see the friend's location.

"Everything about Latitude is opt-in. You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see. For instance, let's say you are in Rome. Instead of having your approximate location detected and shared automatically, you can manually set your location for elsewhere — perhaps a visit to Niagara Falls. Since you may not want to share the same information with everyone, Latitude lets you change the settings on a friend-by-friend basis. So for each person, you can choose to share your best available location or your city-level location, or you can hide."

If your mobile phone is not yet supported by the new version of Google Maps, you can add an iGoogle gadget that has similar features.


Location-based services will be increasingly popular now that mobile phones with GPS and fast Internet connections become the standard and the privacy expectations are changing. Eventually, you'll be able to share your location with other applications and obtain personalized information, alerts and even recommendations. From this perspective, Yahoo's Fire Eagle is better-suited for shaping the future of location-based services.