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Friday, March 28, 2008

Who’s your buddy? (Where’s your buddy?)

By Bob Keefe | Friday, March 28, 2008, 02:07 PM

Location-based services, as they’re called, are some of the hottest things going in cell phones these days. Expect to hear plenty about ways to use your cell phone for mapping-related tasks at the annual CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas next week (which my colleague David Ho and I will be covering for this blog and for our newspapers).

Friday, Verizon beat the rush and announced it is teaming up with a Silicon Valley company called Loopt to offer a new $3.99-a-month service that lets users check a simple mapping service to see where friends in their address book are at any time. From there, they can swap messages on what they’re doing, where they’re going and how to hook up. Sprint started offering the service last year.

Mobile-Map.jpg

Of course such a system is full of potential privacy concerns - and of course, Verizon and Loopt say not to worry about stuff like that. The service is 100 percent permission-based, they point out, and users can turn the location-sharing feature off anytime they want. Check here for more information.

I can see the potential and the pitfalls to such a service. I don’t know how many times I’ve worriedly tried to reach my wife while she was driving somewhere, only to get her voicemail. And while my kids aren’t old enough to have cell phones yet, in the future I’d love to be able to track where they - or at least their phones - are.

But then again, do I really want my boss to know that I’m working at the beach today? (Just kidding, Art. Really. As far as you know).

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