With the launch of Latitude, competing friend finder applications such as Loopt, Whrrl, WHERE, Brightkite, GyPSii and others will now have some serious competition. Even for the well VC-funded start-up among them, launching in 27 countries and supporting 42 languages on multiple devices is today an unachievable dream.
However, it is important to notice a difference here with Latitude. Indeed, these location-based social networks are more than friend finders because their users can share content: geo-tagged pictures and videos, post-its, reviews, etc… In addition, many of them are open to the big league of web-based social networks such as MySpace and Facebook or blogging platforms such as Twitter. Their users can automatically distribute content and location to their pages across these services.
At the current stage of this market it is difficult to clearly evaluate what users are really looking for among the various services offered by these platforms.
More success than Dodgeball
Interestingly, Google is launching this new service one month after announcing it will shut down Dodgeball, another friend finder service it acquired in 2005 and never bothered to really take to the next level with sufficient investments.
But this time we can expect Google will have more success because it will leverage on the existing Google Maps - and to a certain degree Google Talk - users. In addition to that, and probably even more important, Google will build its user base on the existing partnerships it has developed with wireless operators and handset manufacturers which already offer Google Maps to their customers.
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