Location Alert: Lance Held was nearby!
June 21st, 2010, 12:50am by JakeJust got the below item after I installed a new, working, Google Latitude app on the Pre so I could keep tabs on Kelvin. Interesting feature… or creepy? You decide.
Google Location Alert
Lance Held was within 31 km of you in Long Beach, CA at 9:22 PM. Lance is usually 112 km away in San Marcos, CA on this day and time. Check Google Latitude to see where Lance is now.
You received this alert because you’ve shared your location with Lance using Google Latitude, and they have chosen to send Location Alerts when Latitude friends are nearby. Location Alerts are only sent when your friend is at an unusual place during a given time of the week based on their location history, filtering out routine locations such as a daily commute. Lance also received this alert. Learn more in the help center:
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=163844.
Enabling:
Enable Location Alerts for your Latitude account to receive and send alerts when friends are nearby. Go to http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/alerts.
Disabling:
You may choose to not receive future Location Alerts from any Latitude friends by changing your settings at http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/alerts.
June 21st, 2010 at 10:40 am
Wonder if I’ll get a proximity alert later this week?!?
June 21st, 2010 at 10:42 am
But in answer to your question, I vote creepy. Latitude seems like a nice thing to have if we’re all in the same city, or you have a ton of friends on it.
But there’s been a flurry of Latitude-related activity among Board denizens lately — are we buying into it? Does it kill your battery to be constantly updating your location to people who are hundreds of miles away?!?
June 21st, 2010 at 12:01 pm
That feature is opt-in, of course. I like it, though, I’ve never actually used it to meet up with someone that I hadn’t already intended to meet up with. It was actually very cool to use back in December when we were going on a trip to Big Bear with two other cars and our rendezvous point was in Temecula. I got to the In-N-Out first and was able to see where the other cars were. Pretty neat.
@Mike You will totally get an alert later this week! Thursday, to be precise. 🙂
June 21st, 2010 at 12:41 pm
So webOS has no direct Latitude support, so we need to install some 3rd party apps to update the Goog servers with our location. I hadn’t bothered, but started considering it with Palm’s 50% all apps promo. Then yesterday, I went out to meet a Craigslist contact to potentially buy a used Pixi for S, and she wanted to keep track of me in case the exchange went awry. Of course, I got a call from Jake on the drive out, which blocked my data uploading, so she feared the worst. Didn’t end up getting the phone, by the way. Since Sprint CS was closed, I couldn’t activate it to verify it wasn’t bloacklisted (ie, stolen), and I didn’t want to take the chance.