Google Latitude is the location based service, which did not turned to be so much popular as the other major player Foursquare, simple because it does not have enough activities to engage large number of users. All this service has is to update your current location in the background. Until now, users did not had check-ins or badges, but what Google rolled out today might boost its Latitude service to new levels.

Google Latitude

Starting today, Google has launched the Location history dashboard in beta, which will help users identify trends in their travelling habits.

Google Latitude Dashboard

The new dashboard view will provide users interesting trends from their travelling history like the trips they have taken, places they have visited and the time spent in home v/s outside and so on. To try out the new dashboard yourself, you have to enable Google Latitude in the background of your phone, turn on the Google Location history and then wait for a few days for enough history to be shown on your dashboard. Obviously for using this service, you should be in possession of a device that supports location to be updated in the background. Some of the Android and Blackberry phones have this feature, but not the iPhone until now.

Google claims that there are more than 3 million people using the Google Latitude service. Just last week Google has launched the Google Latitude API and now by rolling out the dashboard feature, Google has started to show more interest in its Location based service. But still, it is far behind its most obvious competitor Foursquare. Still there are no badges or check-ins to lure new users, but just some interesting pool of data that if a user is interested in, can digg more and more to churn out some of his travelling trends.  Moreover, most of the hopes are now on the third party apps developers who can come out with interesting apps/services which can harvest more and more out of Google Latitude and attract more users to this service.

[via Google Mobile Blog]