Thursday, February 5, 2009

Mission: Silence Tweets

I maybe wrong but this certainly seems like Google’s answer to Twitter. Latitude, the latest offering from Google is out and is already catching on. It lets you track locations of your family and friends on the run without relying on calls or anything. Latitude is BIG!! And more so because it’s a real time social networking tool. I used it and felt great initially. Cashing in on its existing contact building applications like Gmail and Gtalk, this is the new networking tool that Google could have offered effectively. And so it did.

It still is a bit clumsy in some aspects though. The OS and Browser dependency shall not really popularize it wholesomely and spread the fire as soon as they would have wanted it to. For Mobile phone users, it again is restrained to some few models. But, Google promises to expand the application’s mobile usability reach soon. It’ll be interesting to see how Google propagates it and makes this its primary social networking tool.

What’s most interesting about this application is the ownership rights that a user exercises over publishing their location details. They can opt out of this feature whenever they want. Also, interestingly, the Gtalk status message will now be competing directly with the tweets and I bet Twitter will be hurt if Google gets rid of the compatibility issues.

So now the CEOs will have a perquisite for their managers. Give them a phone with Latitude enabled. And with answer already known, here comes the call from the CEO, “Where are you?”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting post!

Soma
http://steppingintoprojectmanagement.blogspot.com/