I've probably talked enough about Google Latitude shutting down, especially since I rarely used it. But the truth is, it seems like location services in Google+ is going to be a really big thing.
Joe LaPenna, one of the Googlers who worked on Latitude for the past few years, plus one of the Googlers responsible for taking Latitude offline in the upcoming months, posted his thoughts on the topic on Google+.
The highlights include:
- Google+ will be getting location sharing in a big way.
- Latitude code is not being used, they are writing new code from scratch
- The new code will be built with the mindset of not just building it into Google Maps "world where social is a layer across all of the Google experience."
- Google+ app will have latitude like features by the time latitude goes offline
- You need to friend people on Google+ for this feature, so all your old Latitude friends have to be reset
Here is a snippet from Joe's post, but you should read the whole thing.
+Andrew Oplinger and I are going to be the engineers taking Latitude offline in a month's time. Its been incredibly rewarding for us to work on it. We love this product and we've tried our best to understand what it would mean for Latitude to go away and what we'd need to do to keep building on our vision. We know that with this change we'll be able to make people's lives even better and that's all we want to do. I've been doing this for a large part of my life and I'm going to continue doing it.
Forum discussion at Google+.
