Google Latitude: Could be the start of a big deal

It seems like folks in the Silicon Valley have been talking about the promise of mobile technologies and location-based services (LBS, for short) as long as I can remember. “Golly, just imagine when you’ll be able to walk down the street and randomly decide that you need some crack immediately, so you pull out your hologram mobile phone which will render a visual avatar (Star Wars-style) which will tell you where the nearest drug dealer is to score some rock. Won’t that be amazing?”

With that being said, and given a healthy amount of accompanying skepticism and cynicism, I dare say that location-based services really are on the cusp of mainstream. Just yesterday, Google launched this Loopt-lookalike called Google Latitude which essentially lets you stalk the shit out of your friends, assuming that they either a) mis-read the directions and accidentally consent to getting stalked, or b) actually let you see where they are.

What does that mean? Yesterday, when I arrived home in Palo Alto, I casually saw that my buddy Ben, who lives in San Francisco but whose girlfriend lives in Palo Alto, happened to be just a few blocks away at that exact moment. Kinda neat, yeah? We could meet up for a beer. And… that’s about the only useful real-world application I’ve found for the thing so far. That’s not to say stalking Husband of Pseudostoops as he commutes from Chicago to Evanston and back over Google Latitude isn’t fun, but it really isn’t a real use case beyond idle entertainment.

But I think Latitude is an enabler, not an actual application. And while products like Loopt were pushing in that direction, the truth is that starting up a service like that from scratch can take a while (even Twitter took years to get where it is now) and a catalyst like the latent email address books of millions of Gmail users is not a meaningless thing (though some folks who cry about Google copying Loopt would want you to believe that a product head start is all that matters). By the way, isn’t Google being pretty smart about leveraging that asset as a social network/graph these days?

Ultimately Latitude (and similar services) will only become really useful when really useful stuff is built on top of it. Anyone who’s seen Yelp on an iPhone knows that. Well, what are those applications? They’re literally everywhere if you think hard enough. I want a weather map that tells me exactly what’s going to happen within 100 feet of where I am in the next hour (without typing a bunch of shit in). I want to find 10 dudes within a mile radius who want to go play some pick-up basketball around the corner. I want to see a map of all the open parking spots within four blocks of this god forsaken place and reserve one for myself. See? That took 15 seconds to come up with those.

This could be the start of a big deal… or all of those crack addicts will have to keep picking their stuff up the normal way.