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Google Location History Dashboard Makes Latitude Appeal to Data Nerds

by Terrence O'Brien on May 27, 2010 at 05:40 PM

Google Location History Dashboard
We never really grew to accept Google Latitude. Apple's refusal to approve a proper Latitude app ensured the social network was doomed, but its rather rudimentary feature set certainly didn't help matters. When Google launched Buzz, it only seemed natural that the location-based status updater would be folded into the newer product. But, for some reason, Google decided to maintain them as separate products. Even stranger (to us at least), Google is continuing to develop Latitude, and this week introduced the extraordinarily creepy Dashboard view for your location history.

Dashboard is supposed to give you a "more interesting" way of visualizing you location history by identifying trends and breaking down where you've been and how far you've traveled by time, trip and location. In order to get the most out of Dashboard, you'll need to either enable Latitude updates in the background on your phone, or stop to check-in regularly. (The Dashboard itself estimates one to two weeks of data is needed.) And, just for good measure, the Dashboard will tally the total distance of your trips and display them in relation to the distance from the earth to the moon. Google says it will continue to tweak and improve the Dashboard.

While we're confused as to why Google would spread themselves yet thinner in the social networking marketplace by offering Latitude, Buzz and Orkut, we're intrigued enough by Dashboard to give Latitude another look. We'll probably be turning off the sharing features (because sharing our exact GPS coordinates makes us extremely uncomfortable), but we're suckers for statistics. [From: Google Mobile Blog]

Tags: google, google latitude, GoogleLatitude, gps, location, location-based, socialnetworking, top, web

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