The only use I’ve found so far for Google Latitude

Man the location-based arena is heating up. Foursquare and Gowalla continue to explore unique brand integrations (including the IHG + Gowalla integration that DIG produced). And new services or upgrades to platforms are sprouting up every where.  Currently I’m playing with WeReward, SCVNGR, Hot Potato 2.0, Cellfire and Pepsi Loot (though being in Atlanta AND a Coke fan, this one hasn’t gotten much use yet).

But I still don’t know how I’d use Google Latitude yet.  Perhaps some of my Android friends can shed some light. However, I did use it for the first time in a useful way.

Google Latitude allowed my sister and I to keep tabs with each other on the drive back from vacation.

I was traveling back from a massive family vacation – 34 of my family from GA and IL all in one giant house in North Myrtle Beach – and we were about 20 miles ahead of my sister on the drive back to Atlanta.  Every so often we’d call or text to see what exit they were at, and finally it hit me that Google Latitude could help us keep track of each other.

So I called my sister, told her how to set it up on her iPhone and sure enough, we could track each other in real time on Google Maps.  We couldn’t do it for long because it was draining the iPhone battery and oh yeah, you can’t multitask yet so if you wanted to do anything else you’d lose the Latitude connection, but I imagine on an Android phone it would have been a nice experience.

So chalk one up for Google Latitude.  I guess.