So I’ve been playing with Google Latitude recently and it’s both interesting and creepy. Primarily designed to be used on mobile phones, the service can also be used on laptop computer; it detects your approximate location and lets you share this information with friends, optionally with status updates. The idea of adding a geographic component to a friend status list à la Facebook/Twitter sounds like the next logical step.
More interesting, though, is the data required to drive such a service. Google Latitude is powered by the Google Gears browser plugin, which also facilitates offline access to Gmail and a variety of other web enhancements through its in-browser database component. Vaguely mentioned in passing is another, lesser-known feature of Gears: Google’s WiFi location database. Essentially, Google has wardriven major cities in the US and other countries, searching for wireless networks and plotting each wireless router it finds on the map by the geographic coordinates of the drive-by vehicle that detected the wireless signal. With a large enough database, this allows Google to pinpoint most laptop computers on the map by looking up the hardware address of the wireless router they are currently connected to and determining the approximate position on the Earth. Scarily awesome!