San Francisco — In what might be as relentless effort to keep its ever growing audience’s on their toes, search titan Google has tapped another avenue. The company on Monday said that it has expanded the ways its Latitudes offering to allow location updates for friends not using Latitude, the mobile tracking feature which had previously been limited to the Google Latitude service.
Google is adding two new applications that allows users of its Latitude service share their location with people on Google Talk and Gmail services.
With the Google’s Talk service, users can now share their Latitude location though a chat status message with your location (at a city level) displayed to their Google Talk or Gmail chat contacts every time you check in with Latitude.
It looks like this:
Additionally, the company also introduced the Google Public Location Badge Service, which automatically displays information about the user on a blog or social-networking profile that shows precisely where you are. Users will have the option of limiting the status to a specific city, or provide more detailed information on their whereabouts.
“Google public location badge lets you publish your Latitude location on your public Web site or blog. You can just embed the standard badge,” Rohan Seth, a software engineer for Google Mobile, wrote in a blog post. “When you enable this application, your location will be shared publicly and you will not be able to control who can or cannot see it.”
“If you want to have more privacy, you can select “city-level location” or choose to “disable” the badge altogether,” Seth wrote.
Similar to embedding a Google Map, you can pick the terrain type and zoom level, and it pumps out some simple code for you, including a link back to Google Latitude.
The new services are based on Latitude, a service the company launched in February which allows users to track friends and family through their mobile phones. Aside from connecting with friends, many have suggested that the service could have uses in the enterprise as well.
Google is promising more Latitude applications. Yahoo has already beaten Google to the punch on one front, with its Friends on Fire application for Facebook, which lets users share their location with other Facebook buddies using Yahoo’s competing Fire Eagle service.
To enable, visit google.com/latitude/apps.
Google stressed that it takes privacy “very seriously” in regard to Latitude.
“Your location will not be shared with any application without your consent,” Seth wrote. “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.”