Google Latitude

» see google.com/latitude as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

google latitude shipped on february 4, 2009 as a layer on top of google maps. you turned it on, you got a small dot on the map for yourself and one for each friend who had also turned it on. there was no event log and no checkin button. it was just a quiet location share that updated continuously while your phone was on, no feed wrapped around it. for 2009 this was already strange, because nothing else was doing continuous location at all.

the platform list was wider than google could publish for any product today. latitude ran on iphone, on android, on blackberry, on windows mobile, on symbian s60, on a few sony ericsson models. that mix is from 2009, when nobody knew which mobile os was going to win. the service was also a quiet rebrand of dodgeball, which google had bought in 2005 and let rot until the dodgeball founders left in 2007. those founders went on to build foursquare. google launched latitude two years later as a corporate replacement for what they had bought.

latitude showed up in my android maps around 2010. it was a feature you noticed once and either opted into or didn't. nobody i knew used it heavily. it was a useful thing if your group was already mapping their own friends, but in turkey at that point the social-mobile layer was being built around facebook places and foursquare, not google's quiet dot-on-map approach. latitude felt like a thing google was running to claim ground rather than a product anyone had asked for.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the actual mechanic was simple. you had a friend list inside latitude that overlapped with your gmail contacts. you set a granularity per friend, anywhere from exact location down to a city-level fuzz, with hidden as the off switch. that was the whole permission model. google maps showed your friends' dots on whatever map you opened. on android the dots faded out when the friend's phone was off, and the location history feature could quietly track your own movement patterns over time to identify home and work without you ever telling it.

~ the funny part ~

the lineage of latitude is what makes it interesting. dennis crowley and alex rainert founded dodgeball at nyu in 2000. dodgeball was an sms-based check-in service. google bought it in 2005 and let it sit. the founders left in 2007, frustrated, and crowley went straight to building foursquare, which launched in 2009 and became the consumer-facing winner of the location-checkin category. google then launched latitude the same year. so dodgeball itself died and latitude died, while foursquare's social-checkin phase died with them. the underlying idea has stayed alive across each replacement, all from the same person's notebook.

~ the postmortem ~

google announced the shutdown in july 2013 and pulled the api on august 9, 2013. the framing was that location sharing was moving to google plus. it did, briefly. google plus had a location-sharing feature that was effectively latitude inside the google plus app. that lasted until google plus itself was wound down for consumers in 2019. by then google maps had absorbed the location-sharing feature back into itself, more or less the same way it worked under latitude in 2009. the cycle had taken ten years to come back to the same place.

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