Google will soon be releasing the Application Programming Interface (API) for its Google Latitude service. The service enables users to see their friends’ locations on a map that is displayed on a web page.
Steven Lee, a senior product manager for Google, said the company will have a developer preview available soon. “We hope it will support and foster all sorts of applications. Privacy will be very important to this as well. The user will choose for every application, whether they want developers to have access to that data.”
Google Latitude was launched a year ago, and developers have been hoping to see an API for the service. Lee mentioned that the API will be OAuth-based and will require permission for each application in which it is used. While other similar services use a “check-in” use case, the Google service uses a persistent location-sharing model that Google believes can be used to create interesting applications with constant location awareness.