1985 – 2013retired
Blockbuster Video
“Be kind, rewind — the whole world did, and then the world moved on”
“It told friends where you were, back when that felt like a gift instead of a leak.”
Google Latitude was a location-aware feature of Google Maps, developed as the successor to Googles SMS-based service Dodgeball. It let a mobile phone user share their current location with chosen friends, mapped via their Google Account. Users controlled exactly what each person could see down to the city level, could turn it off entirely, and had to explicitly opt in a privacy-first friend, not a tracker.
Google announced Latitude's shutdown on July 10, 2013, and the service went quiet on August 9, 2013, after a brief detour through Google+. It wasn't entirely gone for good, though: in March 2017, Google folded Latitude's location sharing back into Google Maps, so a piece of it still rides along today.
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“Be kind, rewind — the whole world did, and then the world moved on”
“Glass and steel, held call until it didn't, and taught us all how to FaceTime.”
“Signed out one last time — away message: gone but not forgotten.”