Today, we are pleased to announce the Google public location badge. In its simplest form, the badge is an easy way for Google Latitude users to share their current location to the world, whether it be on their website or blog. This works with a simple <iframe> snippet that users can just embed in their page. We have tried to make this process as easy as possible, but we realize there is an entirely different set of people (you guys, the developers!) that want to do more interesting things with their location.
For those users, we are also pleased to announce that we're releasing KML and JSON feeds of the location data underlying the public location badge. You can take your personal KML feed and open it in Google Earth, load it in Google Maps, or put it on your own website with the Google Maps API. Or you can gain access to the raw latitude, longitude and accuracy from your Google public location badge with the GeoJSON format seen below. As an added bonus, both the JSON and KML feeds allow you to fetch the locations of multiple users — you only need to change the user parameter to use comma separated identifiers instead of a single one. These two feeds put location information back in the hands of our users, and we're excited to see the kinds of applications developers will build. If you make something cool, be sure to stop by and show us at one of the upcoming geo conferences!
{ "type":"FeatureCollection", "features":[ { "type":"Feature", "geometry":{ "type":"Point", "coordinates":[ -122.421092, 37.79236 ] }, "properties":{ "id":"-1890825674540886039", "accuracyInMeters":75, "timeStamp":1241400239, "reverseGeocode":"San Francisco, CA, USA", "photoUrl":"...", "photoWidth":96, "photoHeight":96, "placardUrl":"...", "placardWidth":56, "placardHeight":59 } } ]}
Note: These feeds are read only; there is currently no API to let you modify your location.
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