What’s most interesting about Latitude is thinking about why Google prioritized this feature over others for Google Maps. To kill off Loopt? I just don’t see that. After all, how much of a threat is Loopt to Google? Not much. Google Maps is the dominant mapping application on every mobile platform. Ultimately, tracking the location of your friends is a feature not an application. The idea that users were going to launch Loopt on their phone for the sole purpose of checking their friend’s location is just not realistic. It’s natural that this feature was eventually going to come to GMaps. But in the meantime, I doubt Google was losing sleep over Loopt.

So why now then? My guess is amassing more user tracking data. Note that when you enable Latitude on GMaps, Google now ties your Google login to your GMaps installation. This was a link that did not exist before. As a result of all this Google can now record data points such as:

1) Where you go, spend time at, etc.
2) Where your friends go, spend time at, etc.
3) What types of POI’s you search for
4) What routes you take

All very interesting (and very scary) primary data points. It’s not clear if Google can do anything meaningful with this data yet. However, it’s reasonable to expect that that in a year or two, once a lot of this data has been collected, either Google’s search or ad targeting technology will incorporate this info. However, if I am correct that Google is recording this data, they really should make the user aware of this. Of course you can argue that none of the ad networks, including Google, makes online users aware that their every click is being recorded. However, I think there’s likely to be many users who are concerned about their physical location being tracked!

Finally, Latitude is a fantastic way for Google to get users to formally “friend” their contacts. In order to use Latitude, you must have friends on Google’s social network. I, like the vast majority of Google users, have plenty of contacts (via GMail and GTalk) but never formally friended them. Latitude forces users to do this in order to use the service and should help Google build up its social network. This will pay dividends for Google as they continue to expand their social product offerings.

I must say, Google getting serious about mobile is exciting. It’s forcing all the players to step up their game. In fact, my hunch is that Android’s ability to run background tasks had something to do with Apple killing off the push notification system in favor of a more robust background task function for the iPhone. In the end, the consumer wins. I love it!