Before today, your Latitude location was only viewable to people that you became friends with on the fledgling location-based network. But according to Google, “one frequent request was to allow you to share your location with even more people and not just your Latitude friends.” The badge can be grabbed from here, while you can enable location-sharing in Google Talk by signing into Latitude.
Although I certainly wasn’t one of the people requesting this feature, it’s not as potentially scary as it sounds. For example, the Google Talk feature only shows your current city, while the embeddable widget lets you specify the level of location you’d like to share (best available location or city).
Nonetheless, assuming some people do go ahead and enable the feature, it’s great exposure for Latitude. Other applications – like BrightKite and Plazes – already enable public location sharing, but Latitude has the advantage of already having millions of users through Google Talk that can now use this feature.
In other news, while I was impressed with Google Latitude at launch, I’m not actively using it today. Part of the reason is privacy – I’m not super stoked about sharing my location all of the time, and don’t want the hassle of turning the app on and off. Another issue is that I don’t feel like building a separate contact network, and would rather Facebook and/or Twitter simply build location-aware features.