Google Latitude for iPhone and iPod touch now available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. like Apple, Google continues to push for improvements in web browser functionality. Now that iPhone 3.0 allows Safari to access location, building the Latitude web app was a natural next step. In the future, we will continue to work closely with Apple to deliver useful applications — some of which will be native apps on the iPhone, such as Earth and YouTube, and some of which will be web apps, like Gmail and Latitude.
Our Latitude web app provides all the core functionality you might expect: you can see the location of your friends on a map and modify your privacy settings so that you control how your location is shared and with whom. In fact, if my friends and colleagues back in London haven’t yet noticed my absence, they’ll see in Latitude that I’m currently vacationing on the beach in Australia. Hi guys, remember me!?
You’ll also find basic Search and Directions functionality to help you get around the world. And just like our Google Maps for mobile client apps (and more recently on desktop Google Maps), you can press the “blue dot” to be taken to your approximate current location on the map with My Location, thanks to Safari now supporting the W3C Geolocation API.
