
Google Latitude retired - zippie
https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3001634?p=maps_lat_faq
======
gjm11
I don't personally care about Latitude, but it does seem recently that Google
have been on a crusade to ruin Google Maps on mobile devices. The two most
noteworthy instances: (1) screwing up the offline-maps feature
([http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/Ck_Pd6UgZ...](http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/Ck_Pd6UgZCU)
\-- but they've slightly walked this back: see
[https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3246076](https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3246076))
and (2) adding advertisements to the Android version of Maps:
[http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/attract-new-
customers-...](http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/attract-new-customers-
with-local-ads-on.html) (I don't mind this at all on the web version of Maps,
where I'm usually on a display with plenty of pixels, but on a mobile device
that's a whole lot of space being taken up by advertisements instead of
actually useful information).

~~~
zaidf
Google Maps on iOS has been destroyed. It is incredible how good solid apps
commit suicide. For example, I entered "34th and 6th ave ny,ny" for my end
destination. Soon as I submit, it renames it to "34th Street Partnership". Few
weeks ago it would rename to some chiropractor's office a full avenue away.

Before I upgraded my iOS, I'd come to rely on Maps as a regular part of my
life and couldn't live without it. But now it's just a painful experience.

This is the algorithm gone extraordinarily wrong. I _really_ wonder if the
guys who make decisions to change the UI or functionality of highly rated apps
ever take time to _really_ use their own creation. Because if they did, I
don't see how they'd continue with their botched modifications to what was
once a great app.

~~~
magicalist
The app is fine. Google just really has trouble with 6th ave for some reason.
Try it on maps.google.com, it has the same problem ("Avenue of the Americas"
almost always works, but who wants to type that? (or call it that?)).

~~~
zaidf
It worked fine in the previous version. The concept of auto changing street
intersections or street address with names of random venues sucks and is
inaccurate at so many levels. That it would make it to the product symbolizes
an overall failure with the present Maps team.

~~~
jsnell
That kind of rewriting would be stupid, but of course isn't what's actually
happening. In reality there's no match for the geocoding search [34th and 6th
ave ny,ny], so it is interpreted as a local search for [34th and] in the
vicinity of [6th ave ny, ny].

Why isn't there a match for the geocoding search? It's not because somebody
"destroyed Google Maps on iOS", but most likely just due to a switch to a
newer geocoding index. These would be updated frequently with new data from
all kinds of sources, just like web search won't use a static index but one
that changes over time.

Why wouldn't this kind of change be noticed when changing to a new set of
data? Because it'd be essentially impossible to find all possible changes to
geocoding results from a data change, and even less feasible to verify which
of the results are correct. So there's always going to be some kind of
sampling going on when validating new data or code changes. And with a
sensibly sized sample, you're not very likely to be checking a particular
intersection in a very large country.

These kinds of regressions would have popped in and out during the whole
lifetime of Google Maps. Just because you noticed such a change for the first
time doesn't mean that they are currently failing when they weren't before.

~~~
zaidf
The issue has more to do with google trying to match each address with a
business. They are failing because 34th and 6th is one of the most popular
tourist corners in NYC which you'd think would be tested during QA. Moreover
most Maps users will attest that when they enter an address they do not want
it auto translated to the venue name...again something that should have never
made it beyond an idea stage or been reverted soon after release.

~~~
jsnell
No, I'm quite sure that the issue is that geocoding search fails and Maps has
to fall back to a local search.

It is probably bad UX to not make it clear that this is what's happening. But
it would be much worse to fall back to a local business search, drop a pin on
the result, and have the user think that it was an actual geocoder result.

Intersection searches are rare, and there's a limit to how large a set of
queries you can have in a "the results of these searches can never change"
golden set. Again, these kinds of things have always happened with map data,
it's not some kind of new phenomenon. I'd bet there's no less QA going on than
during the times when you thought the quality was good.

~~~
zaidf
_Intersection searches are rare_

No! Intersection searches are the norm, at least in New York City. And the
intersection I listed is one block from the Empire State Building.

They may not be doing less QA. Just a crappier job.

------
ta092838
Google's push towards Google+ reminds me of Microsoft's arrogance in forcing
their vision of Windows 8. An established company trying to get another piece
of the pie that is not their core competency. It's too bad Google is trying to
get into the social game. I wish they would stick to the "serious" endeavors
that started out with, more Wolfram Alpha, less Facebook. They don't have to
own the entire internet, just do things that they can do better than anyone
else...

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
The "serious" endeavors, like glasses and self-driving cars are not their core
business. Not even search or email are. Their core business is advertising,
and social media is what advertisers want today.

Google is largely associated with innovation and they make everything to keep
this image, but at the bottom their business is actually pretty boring:
finding ways to show you an ad.

~~~
ta092838
I would say that indexing and making usable information in different contexts
is their core competency (Search, Email, Maps, Desktop, Android, etc.)
Advertising is a "tack on" to bring in the money, it's not where they are
developing new value to the end user. Ad relevancy is really just a natural
extension of their Search algorithm. If you're a business person you might say
Ads is all Google is, but they still need to develop compelling products (core
competency) to bring in views.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
> Advertising is a "tack on" to bring in the money

Advertising is your core _business_ when almost 100% of your revenue comes
from that. I wouldn't call what turned it from a dorm room project into a
behemoth a "tack on", that's dismissing Eric Schmidt's contribution. What you
do to achieve this goal doesn't matter as much. Amazon core business is
e-commerce but they rent servers and sell portable devices.

> Ad relevancy is really just a natural extension of their Search algorithm.

You can argue that advertising is a natural extension of everything they put
their hands on, from search to social networks to maps to glasses with HUDs.
Everything they develop lately has advertising potential, and are shutting
down everything that doesn't.

~~~
magicalist
> that's dismissing Eric Schmidt's contribution

AdWords predates Eric Schmidt joining the Google board, let alone becoming
CEO.

The rest of your argument is just silly reductionist wankery. Whatever the
"core" of their business really is, they do have people working on those
things. If you're going to make an incentives argument, make it; arguing where
to put the "core" label provides as little insight as repeating "you're the
product" ad nauseam.

The GP is exactly right. Yes, you do have incentives to maximize for
advertising revenue. But if you want to maximize revenue over any length of
time beyond the next quarter, you neglect things like having a product that's
actually useful, usability, intrusiveness of ads, trust in your ability to
keep information private from advertisers and the NSA, etc etc at your extreme
peril. You can have all the advertisers in the world and it does you no good
if everyone stops showing up to look at their ads.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
I wasn't attributing AdWords to Eric though, but the company growth. If I'm
not mistaken, he was responsible for the company growth 2001 onwards, and
focused on the cash cow.

Also, I was just pointing out the dichotomy between the core competency and
core business (what you do well vs. your source of revenue).

------
davidw
Location history, however is here:
[https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0](https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0)

I'm glad they kept that, I find it quite handy for several things, including
as a cross check on how much time I spend at $client.

~~~
whathappenedto
I used location history a lot, and I am now looking into other gps logging
apps because they removed API access to history. The export you can do is only
KML and doesn't have information like accuracy for each coordinate, leading to
a bunch of non-sense locations you can't easily filter out. I wish they simply
had an easy way to subscribe to your own location data, because otherwise many
applications are impossible (such as using your real-time location, or for
personal analytics).

------
jes5199
Sigh. Latitude put Loopt out of business. Now we don't have Loopt and we don't
have Latitude.

Sharing location on G+ is not the same use case at all.

------
saurik
I don't understand why Google kills and replaces things seemingly with no
thought of migration paths. Anyone know more about what goes on internally
that causes companies to just throw up their hands in defeat on a product,
forcing users to just start over? Is it really that hard to shim the Latitude
APIs over the new service?

~~~
eyeareque
From what I can tell their migration path is "Move to Google+". I can't tell
if that is viable, but it does make sense from Google's perspective.

------
Shooti
Latitudes manager seems happy with the decision:
[https://plus.google.com/+jlapenna/posts/deBP7kj7rMi](https://plus.google.com/+jlapenna/posts/deBP7kj7rMi)

Also he offers plenty of behind the scenes reasoning in replies to the thread,
such as this:

"We felt that we'd be able to get quicker feature parity and better newer
features by cutting over now than waiting."

~~~
skeletonjelly
So they are going for feature parity? Woo! I really miss the freshness value
(x minutes ago) and the accuracy radius.

------
kalleboo
This was handy, I'll miss it. Luckily my SO is an iPhone user so I still have
her on Find My Friends...

As the Google wind-down goes on, I've lost all trust in them to keep any of
their services running. I won't invest any more time into a new Google service
anymore. The only question right now is Google Apps email. I like their Gmail
iOS app, but I might switch to another ActiveSync provider (for iOS push
support).

------
hnriot
I wonder how long maps.google.com keeps classic mode. I loathe the new maps,
it's sluggish and trying to be too much.

~~~
hamburglar
Yeah, I frequently find myself clicking back over to classic because I simply
can't figure out how to do what I want in the new mode. When they take away my
ability to do that, I'll groan and curse and increment my "reasons not to get
excited about the Next Big Thing from Google" counter.

------
yock
The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that they have continued
offering location services as part of Google+, but they've retired a service
that works on iOS for one that does not. This strikes me as an incredibly
user-hostile action.

------
enjo
What's the best alternative for Android users?

~~~
caffeineninja
Try Life360. While family-oriented only in name and marketing at the moment,
we are cross-platform on iOS and Android and also have a Latitude importer.

[http://www.life360.com/latitude](http://www.life360.com/latitude)

We're also working on some new features that will make the app less "family
oriented" and more universal for everyone.

~~~
jes5199
[https://www.life360.com/latitude/test](https://www.life360.com/latitude/test)

There is a problem Error calling GET
[https://www.googleapis.com/latitude/v1/currentLocation?granu...](https://www.googleapis.com/latitude/v1/currentLocation?granularity=best):
(404) Not Found

------
swalsh
There was a real use case for latitude, but I don't feel like they pulled it
off right. I live in MA, and my brother lives in WI. We decided to meet each
other in NY once while he was with friends. We used latitude as a way to
communicate our location as we tried to find each other. It worked a lot
better than saying "meet me at the shake shack" since neither of us knew the
area.

The problem with it though was it was slow, thus typically outdated. So 90% of
the time the information was simply not useful.

------
CedricGatay
Hi there, I wanted to let you know the Android / Web application we made with
a friend, it is called lclz.in ([http://lclz.in](http://lclz.in)). We created
it because the end of Google Latitude and the lack for such app.

Lets explain it with a real use case, I want to meet my friend at an open air
music festival with a lot of attendees. The classic way of doing it is calling
him, but with the heavy music we will barely understand each other, plus it
will be difficult to describe where we are to meet.

That's where the application will help : you select the contact you want to
meet, it sends a SMS (or use the share dialog) requesting its location. The
text contains a link to a site allowing any decent smartphone (even
iOS/Blackberry/Windows Phone) to geolocalize him. Once done, you will get a
notification on your phone displaying him on a map !

That's the beginning of the app, we've got a full backlog of ideas for the
upcoming releases. Meanwhile, feel free to install, use, and tell what you
would have loved to see in it.

