I’m tracking my wife, Karen. I never know where she goes during the day, and I’ve had enough.
Using Glympse, a new application that’s embedded on a phone she’s carrying in her purse, I can watch her every movement from my mobile or desktop computer.
As I write this, a map shows her driving through our neighborhood on the way to make her rounds as a visiting nurse. Wait. She just entered the highway. She’s speeding.
Really?
“Now I’m not,” she said, from her mobile. “I’m getting off the exit.”
I checked again. “Right.”
Mobile phone companies have for years marketed “location sharing” services, where people can track your physical movements whenever you have the device turned on.
If it strikes you as strange that anyone would want to broadcast that information all the time, or even much of the time, you’ve just touched on a chief reason why, like a lot of people, I’ve generally avoided these apps.
And even if you like sharing your location with a viewing audience, your viewers must first sign up for the same service and hope their phone is compatible.
Glympse solves the creepiness issue. So far it is available only for the G1 phone, T-Mobile’s offering in the United States and 11 European countries that is based on Google’s Android operating system. The app is coming soon to iPhones and BlackBerrys and devices based on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile system, and it is promising enough that such folks should keep it on their radar.
You can find Glympse in the Android Market. After downloading the app and quickly registering, you can send your whereabouts to anyone who can receive text or e-mail messages. Any Web-enabled phone or PC can receive and display your location information.
When you want someone to know where you are — say, if you’re on your way to a meeting…