Google Discreetly Retires Irksome Latitude Location Alerts Feature

Location based services are indeed very important for users in today’s world, however there are certain things that need to be looked after, things which may not prove to be that much appealing for users in the long run. Google Latitude, the popular service from the internet search giant has been around for quite some time and it has a feature, Location Alerts to be exact, which has irked many users. People using this feature would start getting emails notifying them where their friends were; even they hadn’t opted for any such emails. Google has now ended the Location Alerts feature.

Let’s have a look at what Google has to say about this:

The experimental Location Alerts (beta) app was retired in December, 2010. Retiring features is always a tough decision, but part of building experimental features is picking the best ones on which to focus. Rest assured, we’re continuing to develop apps such as Location History as well as the Latitude API to enable the developer community to create even more ways for you to use Latitude.

Theoretically, this idea may look good, but when it came to the implementation of this very idea, it was troublesome in a lot of ways. Surprisingly, it did not matter if a user chose whether or not to recieve Location Alerts, they still would emails notifying them about where their friends if those very friends had opted to use this particular feature.

An example of one such email:

Subject: Location Alert: Peter XXXX was nearby!

Google Location Alert

Peter XXXXX (XXXXXX@gmail.com) was within 800 meters of you in San Francisco, CA at 7:15 PM. Check Google Latitude to see where Peter is now.

One more thing that may have caused many problems was that users would receive location alerts when their friends were somewhere they weren’t normally at. Given the problems users were facing with Location Alerts, it seems like a good move by the company to kill this service.

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Via Sizlopedia