Google released two new features today for its Google Latitude location-sharing service. You can now put a public location badge with your current location on your blog or web site, and you can now automatically update your Google Talk status with your current location as well. For Blogger users, Google provides a one-click install option for the public badge. Both the public badge and the Google Talk app are currently only available in the US.
Blog Widget and Google Talk
For the Google public badge, users can chooseif they want the widget to show their location at a city-level only, or if they want to allow it to show their location more precisely. Given the public nature of the badge, this will surely raise some security concerns, especially when users choose to update their Latitude data automatically.
The Google Talk widget only uses the name of the city the user is currently staying in to update their status.
Google stresses that it takes its users privacy very seriously, but there can be no doubt that privacy concerns are currently limiting the mainstream appeal of many of these applications.
Google is clearly taking a very serious look at location aware services and according to today’s blog post, the company plans to introduce more applications that can make use of one’s Latitude data in the near future. Google is also soliciting new ideas from its users here.
