Google Latitude: Search without Entering Keywords
February 8, 2009
I have been fascinated by the media and public reaction to Google’s Lattitude service. For a representative example, check out the Scientific American’s story here. The idea is that a Google user can activate a tracking feature for friends. The Lattitude service is positioned as a option for users. The GOOG’s intent is to allow friends and maybe people like parents to see where a person is on a Google Map. Wow, I received several telephone calls and agree to participate in two live radio talk show interviews. The two hosts were concerned that their location could be tracked by anyone at any time. Well, that’s sort of correct but Google Lattitude is not the outfit doing that type of tracking as far as I know.
A couple of points I noted that caught the attention of the media personalities who spoke with me:
- There was zero awareness that triangulation is a well-known method. GPS equipped devices that transmit happily even when the owner thinks a device is “off” is a standard in certain law enforcement sectors. One anecdote that made the rounds in 2001 was that a certain person of interest loaned his personal mobile phone to a courier who was fetching videos from a city in a far off land. The homing device in the nose of the missile destroyed the courier’s four wheel drive vehicle. The person of interest switched to a pay as you go phone, having learned an important lesson.
- The details of the Google Lattitude service, which is flakey and crashes even in Chrome, did not sink into the media personalities’ knowledgebase. Google makes clear what the service is and does. The words don’t resonate. Fear does. Little wonder that there is a thriving business is discussing this immature Google service which works only with certain software on the user’s mobile device. Gory details are here.
- The chipper Googler who does the video about he service sounds to me as if the speaker was a cheerleader at a private school where each student had a horse and a chauffeur. There was what I think one wacky college professor called “cognitive dissonance”. Tracking my husband is, like, well, so coool. Maybe it is my age, but this eager beaver approach to friend tracking troubled me more than the unstable, crash prone service. The video is here.
Next week you will be able to navigate to a Web page and run a query across Google’s USPTO documents and have one click access to a PDF of the patent document. The service is up now and one vendor’s search system is available at this time, but I hope to add additional search systems so you can explore the disclosure corpus yourself. These “innovations” are several years old if you have been reading Google’s technical papers and its patent documents. The baloney that a patent document does not become a product does not hold for Googzilla. If you have been reading my analyses of these documents in The Google Legacy (2005) and Google Version 2.0 (2007) you already know that what is now making its way to alpha and beta testing is three, maybe four years old.
My take on this is that Google watchers are getting blindsided and overly excited too late in the game. When the GOOG rolls out a service or allows a Google wizard to appear in public, the deal is done. Concern about tracking is like fretting over the barn fire three years after the fact. Silly waste of time. The GOOG does a lousy job of hiding its technical direction but few take the time to dig out the information.
Radio hosts should start reading Google technical papers. Would that raise the level of discourse? The tracking service has significant implications for medical device vendors, shipping companies, and law enforcement. So far few pundits are tackling these applications in a substantive way. I touch upon these issues in my forthcoming Google: The Digital Gutenberg here.
Stephen Arnold, February 8, 2009
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