iPhone World

The good news, you’ve already read it up there in the title. The bad news, it’s a web app. Apparently it was decided between Google and Apple that a standalone application would be confused with the standard Maps app. (Read: Apple said no).

Seeing as Safari tends to stay running anyhow, using backgrounder (jailbroken users only) with this shouldn’t be too much of an issue even for 3G owners. Perhaps even using a lightweight alternate browser app solely for Latitude with backgrounder. I haven’t explored much in the browser area so I can’t make any recommendations at this point.

Accessing Latitude is the same as signing into any other Google account. Once a friend is added a request will be emailed to them. They can then choose to accept and share their location, accept and hide their location, or deny. Once accepted, you must use an iGoogle gadget to view the sharers location.

Some folks have no idea what I’m talking about so let me explain. Google Latitude basically lets you  share your location with whoever you like so long as they have a Google account. On the iPhone side of things, you can choose if and how you want to share your location.

Choosing the middle option shown on the right, you can select wherever you’d like your location to appear as.

So far I’m not sure how refreshing works on the PC side of things. After manually setting the location I waited a few minutes and nothing changed. I refreshed the page and then the new location was shown.

Head over to http://google.com/latitude on your iPhone to check it out.

There are also plugins for Latitude. One allows you to publish your location to your blog or website. The other will show your location in Google Talk, currently listed as beta. For the website one, you can choose to share your actual location or just the city. To check either of those out visit the Do More with Google Latitude page.

Hopefully Google will release an API for using Latitude and somebody will create a daemon for running it in the background.