The Web burst into excitement yesterday when Google made its Latitude location-sharing service available for the iPhone. That excitement was short-lived, however, once users discovered the the "application" is limited to the iPhone's browser and isn't a stand-alone application at all. Turns out even the mighty Google will bow before Apple's demands.First, a little bit about Latitude itself. It can be found in the iPhone's Safari browser at google.com/latitude. The service allows users to sign in and share their location with a set group of friends. Everyone needs to opt-in to share and see location information. Latitude lets you see a list of all your contacts who have already signed up for Latitude, and allows you to add them easily to your list of Latitude contacts. In my tests of it, it wasn't not nearly as accurate as the iPhone's GPS can be. Actual location results were typically off by a mile (pun intended).

From my perspective, something like this would be most useful when you're trying to coordinate a meeting between a bunch of friends or colleagues who are spread out in the same city. I can picture a scenario in which I'd use Latitude at a trade show to see where everyone is around town. The problem is, there are serious limitations with Latitude on the iPhone (not including how terrible the accuracy is).

I think this admission by Google spells it out pretty clearly:

We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.

I have one word in response: LAME.

Users have to open the browser and leave it running in order to use Latitude. That means it won't work in the background. This feature should be incorporated directly into the Maps application on the Phone, which, by the way, uses Google's Mapping data. That makes much more sense, and would give it a better chance of actually providing accurate location data.

Google even admits this. It said:

Unfortunately, since there is no mechanism for applications to run in the background on iPhone (which applies to browser-based web apps as well), we're not able to provide continuous background location updates in the same way that we can for Latitude users on Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Window Mobile. Nevertheless, your location is updated every time you fire up the app and then continuously updated while the app is running in the foreground.

To me, that's a direct pot-shot at Apple and a weak attempt by Google to appease users (like pretty much everyone) who might be disappointed with the way Latitude works on the iPhone.

In this case, Google and Apple both fail.