With the New Google Latitude API, Build Latitude and Location Into Your App
Location, location, location. In case you haven’t
noticed, we’re really excited about all the ways location can make mobile apps and websites
more useful. With
Google
Latitude, we created a simple way to share your location with whomever you like,
display it wherever you
like, and
even keep a
history of it if you want. We wanted to give you even more ways to use your
location, so today we’re announcing the
Google Latitude API -- an easy and
safe way to build Latitude and location into any apps or features that you could possibly
imagine!
Since launching Latitude, our team has been talking about all
the cool things you could do with your continuously updated Latitude location. While we’ve
built
some of our ideas, there
are simply too many exciting ones for us to do alone. Instead, we wanted to let developers
create apps that do even more with Latitude and location. You could, for example, build apps
or features for:
- Thermostats that turn on and off automatically when you’re
driving towards or away from home.
- Traffic that send alerts if there’s
heavy traffic ahead of you or on a route you usually take based on your location
history.
- Your credit card accounts to alert you of potential fraud when a
purchase is made far from where you actually are.
- Photo albums so your
vacation photos appear on a map at all the places you visited based on your location
history.
We want to help developers build all these applications and
more, but our first priority is privacy and making sure we give users control over their
location. That way, it’s only used when, where, and how users choose. When you request access
to Latitude users’ data, users will have to specifically grant access to your domain after
seeing exactly what data is being requested. You may request to update and view users’ best
available location, view only their city-level location, and/or update and view their location
history if they’ve opted in to using
Google Location History. Users
will also be able to revoke access from any developer at any time from their Google Account’s
personal settings.
Just like with Latitude, the user always chooses who can see their location.
We’ve also learned that making a phone’s continuous location available in the background
is tricky to do accurately and efficiently -- just imagine your phone’s battery life if
several apps were continuously getting your location in different ways. With this in mind, we
wanted to build a free and open Latitude API that lets you just start using your users’
updated locations in new ways without reinventing the wheel.
To get
started, go to
http://code.google.com/apis/latitude
to read our API documentation. Then, join the
Latitude API Google
Group to ask questions, discuss the API with the community, and give us feedback.
The Latitude API is being launched in Labs so we can listen to developer feedback before it
graduates. We’re excited to see what you can do with Latitude and location so please let us
know what you think!
By Ana Ulin, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team
