Google is retiring its Latitude location-sharing service on August 9th

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/07/10/google-is-retiring-its-latitude-location-sharing-service-on-august-9th/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheNextWeb+(The+Next+Web+All+Stories)

by fraqed • 13 years ago

52 58 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

sssparkkk• 13 years ago

Somewhat understandable, but that doesn't mean I don't hate the fact this has been 'moved' to Google+ now. I'm afraid a lot of my friends won't take the time to set this up in the (bloated, compared to maps) Google+ app.

And when you think about it, why shouldn't the location of your friends not be just another layer in the maps app? Seems like a logical place to be able to find this kind of information.

danleech• 13 years ago

I completely agree. Google+ was meant to enhance all of Google’s products, adding social features. What Google seem to be doing is the opposite.

brazzy3• 13 years ago

Google+ is first and foremost meant to be a serious competitor to Facebook, but hasn't been able to overcome Facebooks gigantic lead in the network effects.

But Google really, really wants to break into that market. Now what's happening is simply that they're sacrificing their less profitable services in order to force people to start using Google+, in an attempt to get over that network effect threshold.

ElliotH2• 13 years ago

Unsurprising, the application doesn't fit in with the new styles, doesn't behave correctly with less-than-perfect location data, doesn't understand multiple location sources.

I was quite a fan of finding how far I'd walked, but Google Now tells me that once a month now.

snogglethorpe2• 13 years ago

I was quite a fan of finding how far I'd walked, but Google Now tells me that once a month now.

I compared the results of my phone's pedometer function (which seems to be quite accurate) to Google Now's walk reports, and the distances Google Now gave were wrong by an order of magnitude ... soooo, pretty much useless... ><

[I've no idea how Google Now tries to calculate this, but whatever method it uses seems to be absolutely awful...]

ElliotH2• 13 years ago

Oh, that's a pity - what app do you use to do that?

jerrya• 13 years ago

Sigh. Latitude was easy to use and quite handy to track (flight following mode) friends and relatives on long distance trips. G+ is nice, but a huge amount of overkill just to get that back.

AndrewDucker• 13 years ago

Darnit - I _did_ find this useful. On a walking holiday with my family recently, and we were able to meet up with each other very easily through Latitude, despite being in the middle of nowhere.

scrrr• 13 years ago

Yes, same here. But there's probably useful alternatives.

IlPeach• 13 years ago

as..... ?

seanalex2• 13 years ago

Surprisingly, this is the only Google service I did not want to go away. My wife and I use it frequently every work day. She is an animal control officer here in Houston, and Latitude is the way we keep in touch with where we are. The job is dangerous enough that I like to know her current location frequently just to make sure she is alright. She's on a windows 7 OS phone, I'm on an android... so a lot current-day applications are out of the question. Maybe it's time I code my own location services for us that would be more accurate, frequent, and private.

joshmlewis2• 13 years ago

Use Glympse, it's awesome and is compatible with a few different devices.

seanalex2• 13 years ago

Great, thanks for the suggestion. I'll set us up on it tonight and see how it works.

freehunter• 13 years ago

Competition in the market is a great thing and I welcome more competitors, but you're exactly right. The entire mobile market is completely fragmented. Whether you use iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, or any of the other competitors, you've likely experienced an app you'd love to install but it doesn't exist for your platform. Linux users are used to struggling with a developer to try to get a port when programs were made for Windows only. Now we're at the stage where many great programs are only written for half the market. At least on Linux you can use Wine for many things, or run a VM at worst.

When we made the move to mobile devices, we took a major step backwards in the maturity of technology. Some days I miss the simplicity of only having to pick between Windows Mobile and Palm OS when choosing a mobile audience.

gioele2• 13 years ago

Whether you use iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, or any of the other competitors, you've likely experienced an app you'd love to install but it doesn't exist for your platform. Linux users are used to struggling with a developer to try to get a port when programs were made for Windows only.

Try being a Linux user on a PowerPC box.

I hope developers, most of which have become mobile developers by now, have now understood that open protocols are much more important than application availability.

apa-sl5• 13 years ago

What a surprise just in time as with my friends we have just published our simple location sharing app called TeleportMe :-). It's currently available for iPhone (update upcoming this week) and this month should be also released on Android.

Please visit http://TeleportMe.to if you are are looking for a super simple on foot navigation (just follow the arrow) with ability to save places (called teleports) and share them easily with your friends through text, email, facebook or twitter. Any comments are welcome. We will be also enabling users to use nice vanilla links to places such as http://TeleportMe.to/StarbucksGdynia

We planned to show it on HN after releasing Android and few updates as not all planned features are already there, but screw that

digitalengineer4• 13 years ago

Looks nice. Just installed on iPhone 5, latest iOS but it crashes if I want to share the location via the mail button. also your site is really slow... (HN traffic?)

apa-sl5• 13 years ago

Thank you for some nice words.

Crash: we will take a look into that today, thank's for the tip.

Website: it's launchrock and yes it's slow. We've just removed one script, should be better (but not perfect). We will have to final

In any case I'm pasting direct appstore link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/teleportme/id663199958

apa-sl5• 13 years ago

FYI: today we will be uploading the first update for iPhone. hope you like it :-) I encourage you to follow us on www.facebook.com/TeleportMe or @TeleportMeApp on Twitter to be up to date.

skeletonjelly2• 13 years ago

Another one of those people who uses it to track their spouse. Handy to find out where they are. Not in a creepy way, it just makes me feel more in tune and connected.

Tried out the G+ version just now, pretty shit in comparison. The feature set it pretty non existent, I can't take advantage of Maps' directions and there doesn't seem to be a way to pop their location out onto the main Maps app. Poor form Google :( At least make the replacing solution on par.

VLM• 13 years ago

"Tried out the G+ version just now, pretty shit in comparison"

I used latitude to do coordinate based geolocation. So on the map of the park, I see my spouse is around one mile from the intersection of the red hiking trail and the blue hiking trail, OK I'll head over that direction and we'll meet up for lunch.

In the G+ app, at least so far at a glance, I can only check into street addresses and the like. Or I can write reviews. Thanks, I already know I'm at the state park, and I don't want to check into the gas station across the street from the entrance.

Its very interesting that geolocation is focusing on "asphalt people" and abandoning outdoorsmen. Its depressing there are "geo" apps that have the worldview that human beings can only physically move via paved roads and airports.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

That's a good opportunity to explore more secure (perhaps P2P-based) alternatives, now that we know where all this information ends up at.

martingordon2• 13 years ago

I use it to keep track of my own location and have been since the iPhone app was released way back when and I'm sad to see this go. It's been great to be able to relive my travels and is particularly useful when trying to geotag photos.

Are there any location-tracking alternatives (I don't care about sharing it with friends) for iOS that offer KML/GPX export and are battery-friendly?

AndrewHampton• 13 years ago

This was my main concern too, but it looks like you can still keep track of you location history. That functionality is getting folded into maps.

laumars2• 13 years ago

My friends and I use Glympse. (Android and iOS)

edit: I've just noticed that Glympse has been recommended a few times in this thread already. I predict downloads for Glympse will sky-rocket over the coming days / weeks.

martingordon2• 13 years ago

How does Glympse make money?

skinnymuch2• 13 years ago

I have Glympse on my Windows Phone. It doesn't do any exporting that you know of though, right?

greendot• 13 years ago

I always wanted this to actually function correctly. It worked great on my Android phone but syncing locations with my wife on her iPhone was problematic at best. It never worked. G+ between the two is also "iffy".

One side of me admires Google for all that they do for "free" but I sometimes wish they would put the phone users in the customer role and maybe these products would evolve.

Am I the only one that would like to see a shared platform with documents, messaging, and location?

I would GLADLY pay a monthly fee to sync up our family between Android,iPhone, and web. Things like, grocery lists, to-do lists, events, photos, reference documents, and the ability to see where we are so we can plan the day w/out having to ask "Where are you?" or me sending a text every day, "OMW home". They're all there now, with things like Google Docs, Evernote, Dropbox, etc, but with kids and a non-tech minded wife, the pieces don't fall into place easy.

hahainternet5• 13 years ago

This is pretty much how Google+ is going to work. They're merging Latitude with it at the moment so you can share your location to the 'family' circle and see where people are. They've got google docs which has identity integration already etc.

They're not too far away really. G+ is their plan to do this.

allard• 13 years ago

Won't that require the person you're sharing with to be on G+? Currently I share with family who has no interest in that by embedding.

https://latitude.google.com/latitude/b/0/apps

gcb03• 13 years ago

Free? I paid 600 for my phone directly from Google and my wife paid 700 from hers. Doesn't seem much free now.

ewolf3• 13 years ago

I hope this will give rise to some replacement services; Latitude was actually pretty useful. I'm still wondering why they didn't implement "asking" for locations via push? That would save a lot of battery compared to updating in intervals and would be a lot more accurate.

hahainternet5• 13 years ago

Latitude is just being merged into G+. I can't see any features that are being killed.

gcb03• 13 years ago

Moving to g+ is the same as killing.

Its the same with sites that only have a Facebook login. Goodbye.

ewolf3• 13 years ago

I haven't used G+' location features a lot so far, but if they are anything like Facebook's, they certainly don't replace Latitude. This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019298) seems to affirm this.

skinnymuch2• 13 years ago

I don't think you can track your location history with G+.

ydant• 13 years ago

They sort of did - they had a "request check-in" function. It never worked very well.

They also had an accelerated and supposedly more accurate tracking option on demand (i.e. I could request my wife's location to be updated "in real time"). That never worked very well and was removed.

ewolf3• 13 years ago

That's strange — I've always had the impression that the battery usage of GPS was the main obstacle for location tracking services, so that any way to sidestep expensive polling would be a greatly welcomed remedy. I can't imagine that this would be technically impossible.

coin• 13 years ago

Ugg, yet another mobile device hostile website

gcb03• 13 years ago

I try to be conscious and not buy the new gadget/car year. I'm still holding up a nexus one. Working around all the hardware bugs... But i probably will not be able to install the huge g+ crap app just for latitude because this phone has like few hundred megabytes for apps..

Natmas• 13 years ago

Maybe this opensource app will be of some use for someone:

http://www.gpsautoresponder.com/

It takes a different approach to sharing location: Anyone with the possession of the generated link can get the device's location and the device owner is notified about it.

The android app and the web service are both open-source so you can improve it and even host this on your own server and have the ultimate privacy.

jjsz• 13 years ago

There's always MyTracks on Android.

Google is retiring its Latitude location-sharing service on August 9th

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