Location^3, Or Going "Long"itude with Google's Latitude

According to Bloomberg- the U.S. housing market lost $3.3 trillion in value last year and almost one in six owners with mortgages owed more than their homes were worth as the economy went into recession, Zillow.com said. The median estimated home price declined 11.6 percent in 2008 to $192,119 and homeowners lost $1.4 trillion in value in the fourth quarter alone, the Seattle-based real estate data service said in a report today.

Google has released Latitude, an add-on to Google Maps that displays one's location to his/her "friends." It relies on Google Maps’ My Location feature, which uses the signals from nearby cellphone towers to plot a user’s whereabouts. That means the mobile version of Latitude can be used only on smartphones like Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry and devices running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile or Google’s own Android operating system. Steve Lee, product manager for Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude, acknowledged that limitation but said smartphone penetration had reached an “inflection point,” with more than 50 million Americans using them. “We feel it’s a much richer application” than Dodgeball, he said. (from NYT.com)