Google Latitude on the iPhone? It's Terrible, Try Brightkite
Google announced today that its location based social network Latitude is now available in-browser on the iPhone and many iPhone owners will no doubt give it a try. We'd recommend you check it out and then promptly download the app for Brightkite, a startup in the same sector. Brightkite is so full featured it makes Latitude look like a frustrating joke.
Much has been written already today about Apple's insistence that Latitude be accessed through the browser, instead of as a downloaded app. That's hardly the only thing wrong with it. So far, it's just plain terrible. Here's why.
The short version of this list of complaints is this: Google Latitude is just a dumb list of your friends and their physical locations. Right now there's nothing more to it. Brightkite, on the other hand, makes location-based social networking seem worth doing because it's got far more useful features.
- No status messages
- There are no places in Latitude
- No granular control over location exposure
- Refreshing my location is not intuitive
- No web interface or much of anything, it's locked up in a widget
- You can't sort contacts by proximity
There's no way to post any additional information to Latitude along with your location. It's just your location, nothing more. That means no context. You can see where your friends are but there's no way to know what they are doing!
Brightkite, on the other hand, lets you post text messages or photos with your location updates. A stream of location updates from your friends or other people becomes meaningful, readable.
In Brightkite, people check in from places - named public businesses or other locations like stores, parks, etc. With just a few clicks Brightkite can guess what place you're at, and not just places other Brightkite users have identified. You can also look at the history of check-ins and comments from other users at that location.
In Latitude every place is just another dumb spot on a map, with no history or context.
In Latitude you're either public or private, down to the half-block or zoomed out to say what city you're in. Luckily the service got my house's location wrong by 5 blocks, but other users say it's quite precise. Why can't I expose my location with more granular control? Why can't I show where I am with a half mile, for example?
You can change the crude settings on a friend-by-friend basis ("only show this person what city I am in") but it's a far cry from the much more privacy-conscious set up at Brightkite. When you launch the app you're greeted with a very reassuring tutorial on how to control your visibility. There's all kinds of options to change how close your location listing will be to where you're detected as being by your phone.
One nice thing about Latitude is that you can manually drag a map marker to a location to register as being there. I haven't figured out how to do that on Brightkite yet.
Every time you visit the Latitude web page on the iPhone, your location is updated. If you'd like to have more control over the experience, or manually refresh it, you have to click through a few screens and then (I think) click on an unmarked blue button.
On Brightkite, "checking in" is a very conscious act.
There is no way page for Latitude! When you visit the service's home page you are prompted to install an iGoogle widget for Latitude. That's where you do some basic account and friend management, but there's no RSS feeds, no direct access to the page, it's like one of those dime store games where you tilt a box covered in plastic around to navigate some object through a maze. You can't touch the object, you can't touch the maze, it's an odd way to participate in a social network.
Just for the sake of comparison, the Brightkite web page is remarkably well designed and full featured. There are RSS and KML (map data) feeds for every user. That means you can do interesting things with the information, offsite.
The only way to view your friends on Latitude is in the order they have checked-in in, the most recently updated first. Why would you not be allowed to see who is closest to you?
On Brightkite I didn't even need to add any friends for the service to be interesting - I can view people who are within the same region, city, area or block as me and have updated their location publicly.
Brightkite is small, but it's so much better than Latitude that it's remarkable. There are other options out there as well, from Shizzow for local networking to Tripit and Dopplr for travelers.
If any of those startups came out with an offering as boring as Latitude they wouldn't be taken seriously at all. It's clearly Google's size, access to our address books, ability to push users to a new service through other established services and the unspoken concern about Google knowing where we are that combine to make Latitude interesting. There's also a chance that Latitude could become something fabulous, as many other Google products have. There are many other Google products that have not, though, as well. So far Latitude, even for the iPhone, isn't worth much time and isn't a good indicator of the potential of the location based social networking genre.
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Brightkite doesn't let you stalk me.
Posted by: Robert Scoble
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July 23, 2009 6:59 PM
@Robert it's hard to tell if you mean to say that's a bad thing.
Posted by: ɐ ɯıʞ sıɹɥɔ
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July 23, 2009 7:02 PM
I like being stalked. :-)
Posted by: Robert Scoble
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July 23, 2009 7:03 PM
Well, that's kinda what I figured, but thought I'd ask while I was here
Posted by: ɐ ɯıʞ sıɹɥɔ
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July 23, 2009 7:04 PM
Or foursquare, even better than BrightKite. :-)
Posted by: Jesse Stay
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July 23, 2009 7:11 PM
I agree!
Brightkite is better.
my problem with BrightKite is it sucks at auto-detecting my location and that I can't get my friends to sign up for yet another twitter type site. But, a google app, they will probably be willing to use it.
Posted by: Bill Rawlinson
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July 23, 2009 8:25 PM
turns out latitude isn't too hot at figuring out where I am either. WTF? And your right the interface kind of sucks. Though the fact that it is a web-based app is pretty cool - I just wish it was integrated with the built in mapping app on the phone.
Posted by: Bill Rawlinson
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July 23, 2009 8:29 PM
But...but...but...it's Google! We need to give them more information!
Posted by: Hunt
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July 23, 2009 9:05 PM
As an avid @brightkite user, adoption is a problem. Why not add latitude to maps(or backgrounder for jailbreak?) Possibly go the fire eagle route? The winner in this space is not only the interface, but the final aggregating api.
There's also a chance that Latitude could become something fabulous, as many other Google products have
I love that you guys slammed Latitude. This is such a weak offering in the face of Brightkite and Loopt. And yet, I sadly wouldn't be surprised to see Latitude snag its fair share of attention and decent adoption simply because it's Google. Bummer.
There are actually a very critical situation good
wouldn't go as far as calling it terrible, I for one detested the brightkite experience, latitude feels simpler, does what I need which is to update my location, know wher my friends are and possibly get directions to where they are.
The latitude experience on the android is better though.
Latitude, like Fire Eagle, seems more like an API than a service, to me. It's like they created a way to put in and store your location, but then left out everything about what you can do with it, letting other developers come along and make use of it.
I just found BrightKite a week ago, and have been talking it up to my friends and such. One of the best features of BK is that it can update other services with your info, sharing it out to Facebook, Twitter, even updating Fire Eagle.
If/when BK gets Fire Eagle updates to be able to check you in to a place, then they should really look into integrating Latitude as well, for similar functionality. I'd like to be able to use any location-aware system, whether it uses Fire Eagle, Latitude, BrightKite, whatever, and have every system updated all at once with one update from me.
Posted by: http://ottodestruct.com/blog/
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July 24, 2009 6:38 AM
I am a big fan of Brightkite but as commenter Bill says, the auto-locate feature isn't anywhere as good as Foursquare.
Crystal ball time, Brightkite is great but Foursquare wins because you can actually do something like become mayor of a location by visiting it the most times, which can get you perks like free coffee/beer. Brightkite checking in is like sending email to dev/null, you do it and nothing really happens.
No, checking in on Brightkite lets your friends know that you are at an actual, human-readible location, and it let's you create and view media *about* a location. I'm not out to play a silly game about where I am. I want to know about people, easily meet up with friends, and make new ones. That's Brightkite.
Posted by: David Chartier
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July 24, 2009 7:44 AM
It is. I love BrightKite. Yet never use it because I have an LG Neon and not a smart phone. ;( I'm not going to spen 600 dollars on an iPhone 3G S. Not yet that is.
Posted by: Zachary TG
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July 24, 2009 8:14 AM
I wish I could convince MORE of my friends to use Brightkite. I love it and think it's potential will grow as more users get in to it.
I think a big part of my problem with these things is where i live, as opposed to the technologies around them. I live in very small city and there just aren't that many places where my friends might be. Plus, most of the people I know are married and are thus going to be either 1. at home, 2. at work, 3. with me already - so, at least at the moment, I don't see a huge need for location based stuff (even if I think the idea is cool).
Posted by: Bill Rawlinson
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July 24, 2009 8:36 AM
I wrote some blog comparisons on Brightkite versus Latitude and what the heck all the settings were for Latitude. I still think Brightkite is the winner. It even has the iPhone native and BlackBerry app http://TheSocialNetworker.com is whee I wrote the articles
Posted by: Chris Miller
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July 24, 2009 10:24 AM
a link to the actual article would be quite a bit more useful Chris..
Posted by: Bill Rawlinson
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July 24, 2009 11:08 AM
Your "email this" link doesn't work. Instead, it goes to your ShareThis page.
Posted by: rumblestrut.myopenid.com
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July 24, 2009 11:27 AM
www.mizoon.com is similar to Brightkite, you can use Facebook connect to invite your friends to join and you choose when to tell it where you are and share as little or as much information as you like. There is also an increasing amount of info about cool locations in my neighborhood.
You can use google latitude and facebook with the facebook app "footprint history" http://apps.facebook.com/footprinthistory
Google Latitude on the iPhone? It's Terrible, Use Brightkite http://bit.ly/2rytQ [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2810280282]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 11, 2009 10:22 AM