Hands On: Getting Started With Google Latitude
With a company, family and an active social life, it's hard to keep up with where my family, friends and employees are at any point in time. As a result, when I heard about Google's Latitude location tool , I had to try it out.
As you probably know by know, Latitude ingeniously figures out where your contacts are based on the closest cell-phone tower, even if they're not on a call. It works in most of the U.S and in 27 other countries -- though as soon as you're in a rural area that doesn't have phone coverage you can't be found. It's also only accurate to within about half a mile.
I started by getting a bunch of friends and family members to download and install Version 2.3.2 of Google Maps onto their phones (it's only 415KB so it won't fill up your phone's memory). To make it work, everyone connected to Latitude needs to have a Google account, and that account has to be set to allow their phone to be associated with their profile and tracked.
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