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Remember the days before mobiles (some of you actually won’t!)? Plans to meet friends were made days in advance, there was no changing plans at the last minute, you had to be where you said, when you said. In theory this sounds great, no last minute cancelling, no slack time keeping, however, it’s not much fun when it all goes wrong and you’ve got some poor guy waiting alone in the rain for a friend who isn’t going to make it!

But now thanks to the mobile phone you need never wait alone in the rain again. Plans needn’t be made days in advance, and times needn’t be so strict. Now we wonder just how people found it possible to ‘play things by ear’ before they could put a mobile phone to that ear!

But now the latest Geo-location mobile technology could further change the way we live our lives.

One such application of this technology is Google Latitude (see above). Google Latitude enables users to let their friends know where they are by sharing their location via their phone. Users simply open up Google maps on their mobile to see where their friends are. Users can turn the service on and off as they please and choose exactly who they want to share their location with. No longer do users have to tell people they’re running late, because they can see for themselves. In fact there might be no need to plan at all, just take a look who’s out and about and go and meet them.

The service has been running since February this year, but only on a limited number of handsets, real change can only occur when the service is available to the majority of mobile owners, but this might not be far off with smartphone ownership rising and new versions planned for the near future. The concept is nothing new, people have been sharing there location via twitter and facebook status updates for years now, but the key here is the ease of the process. Social tools are only useful when other people are using them, and things only get used by large numbers of people when they are easy to use. The simplicity and effortlessness of sharing your location automatically could be the key.

Google was by no means the first to be offering this kind of service, we’ve already got location based twitter clients such as Twinkle and location based social networks such as BrightKite, FourSquare, and many many more. But Google might just have the reach, the technology, and perhaps most importantly the financial resources to take the technology to the mainstream. The service has been available for a while now on Google android phones, Blackberries and a few other devices, but its when it finally gets released for the iPhone (Google says ‘coming soon’) we might just see the service brought back into focus.

But of course, as much as the power of Google can work for the service, it can also work against it. Many people are sceptical, or even fearful of Google’s motives, and the last thing they want is for Google to have information on exactly where they are. But then, whenever you’re signed into Google on your computer they have a pretty good idea of exactly where you are anyway. Perhaps a bigger worry is who else might be able to get their hands on the data, and whether this is just another step towards Orwellian society.

Its unlikely Google will start pushing users location based ads directly at users through the service. Latitude could help establish the role of Google maps as the local mobile search service. If you’re using Google maps to find your friends chances are you’re also going to use it to find everything else as well such as the nearest pub.

Services such as Google Latitude and other location based social networks are another step towards a real time web. People are getting more used to having access to real time information at their finger tips wherever they might be. The more that people use these features the more their behaviour will be dependent on them. Just think how essential mobile phones have become, and how frustrating it can be if you or someone you’re meeting doesn’t have it on them (or perhaps doesn’t even have one). Perhaps soon it might be the case that if we are not sharing our location with our friends, we’ll go back to waiting alone in rain.

Update: As of today (23/07/09) Google Latitude is now available for iPhone, however it’s not a downloadable app as expected, but can be accessed via the Safari browser. Obviously this makes it a lot more effort to share your location as you need to access the browser each time, furthermore, users will not be able to get Google Latitude services via their iPhone Google maps application. This move might take latitude another step forward, but it might not be until the next version of the iPhone that we really see the power of this technology be it using Google Latitude or even a similar service from apple.