Two interesting new features have been added to Google Latitude.  Firstly, there is a history service, that will record your location history (ie the position updates you elect to send to Google in the first place), and let you view the information on the Google Latitude website.

Secondly is an alert service.  This will alert you by email or SMS when you and your friends are closeby. However, to save you being alerted when your work colleagues are nearby, it will use the location history information to try to determine your regular and “unusual” locations, and will only alert you to friends nearby when you are at an “unusual” location.  To determine the regular locations, it can take up to a week for Google to work these out, and only once this is complete will Google start sending alerts.

Alerts can be sent via email to your Google email address, or via SMS (which seems to offer most UK mobile networks), although there is no mention of whether they are any costs associated with the SMSes.

This can all be accessed via this webpage to configure the settings.  As these settings and information is all at the Google backend, no updated client is required.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.