Earlier this week Google launched Latitude, a location-based service that physically maps your location and the locations of your Gmail contacts on your cell phone and iGoogle. Google isn’t the only company to have thrown their hat into the location-based applications ring; the technology has been around since before Dodgeball (that’s a long time) and two of the more mature and feature-rich services today are Loopt and Brightkite.

Unfortunately for most, our personal social networks aren’t defined by Google and Gmail, making Latitude interesting but not yet useful. A more accurate representation of our personal relationships can be found on sites like Facebook and MySpace but until those sites launch there own mapping features, we’ll have to settle with a less than accurate social map. On the bright side, the launch of Google’s own service is a clarion call to the value of location-related applications.

Developing a fluid and accurate map of our social network for cell phones, Blackberries and iPhones is a post for another day, but the implications of the technology raises some interesting questions. The applications for commercial uses are as obvious as location-specific ad targeting but for the nonprofit sector it’s less clear.

As the technology develops and reaches critical mass, we’ll begin to see interesting uses in the nonprofit sector.

What uses might we see?

We’ll have access to neighborhood focused volunteer opportunities from projects like The Extraordinaries and iVolunteer. We will effectively organize community-based initiatives and actions. We’ll use social network oriented sites like MealBaby and FriendlyFavor that help us help each other. We’ll be able to target advertising to the communities we serve and spread the message to the appropriate people. We will rally our friends and neighbors to quickly organize Carrot Mobs.

The technology has a while to go before it reaches critical mass and is interoperable with our entire social network but the potential is obvious.

What ideas do you have? What benefits do you see in this technology from an altruistic perspective?

Posted by Scott S. You can also check out his previous post, Idealist at 2000.
[This blog entry appeared on an older version of Idealist; any broken links are a result of having re-launched our site in Fall 2010.]