Rishabh had blogged about the launch of Google Latitude and how it allowed you to share your current location with anyone you wished to. Now it seems google has integrated this feature to its social networking platform Orkut. This integration is a natural progression as Orkut is a place where friends share stuff with each other.
Google Latitude isn’t added as a default feature but as an orkut application that users can add to their profile if they would like to share their location with their friends and see their friends location.
Orkut + Latitude + Mobile = Location based social networking?
The question that comes to my mind is if you add up orkut (social networking), Latitude (location sharing) and bring it on a mobile phone (both orkut and latitude are available on mobile) then you are talking about location based social networking. Just like loopt but larger in scale as this would mean 12 odd million orkut users would be able to network and share their locations with each other. This also means location based ads and targeting would be possible.
All this isn’t as easy as it seems but given google’s steps towards this direction one can surely say that location based social networking would become this way sooner than we think.
