Google has been on a roll shutting down some of our beloved services lately. The most significant is Google Reader, which died last week. Now the Search Giant has announced the coming death of Google Latitude, another helpful service I (and many others, I’m sure) have grown to love over the past years.
No exact explanation was given yet. We are only told that Latitude and its related services will be retired coming August 9th. This includes Latitude for browser (maps.google.com/latitude), Latitude in Google Maps for Android, Latitude for iOS, the Latitude API, the public badge and the iGoogle gadget.
Latitude will disappear from the “Map” with the next update to Google Maps, and feature will no longer work after said date. Google recommends that those who still want to enjoy location sharing go to Google+, but not many of us will want to do that.
Some users don’t want to use Google+ at all, so it will be hard to get users to share their location with you. Latitude was simple to adopt because everyone using Android already has Latitude. There was no need to sign up for any extra services.
It’s upsetting to see Google killing all these products to push Google+, but maybe this will make the social network better in the long run. For now, I will have to keep asking friends for addresses and business names when I need to find them.
Just out of curiosity, how many of you were using Google Latitude? I use it quite often, to be honest.
[Google]
