Google Latitude
By this time, you must have heard about Google’s latest new product release, Google Latitude. It’s a service that you can use on your location-aware mobile phone to find your friends on a map and interact with them — whether you’re on your phone or on your PC.
Wait a second . . . that sounds awfully familiar!
Oh, of course . . . it’s a great concept that we turned into Swirl Connect two years ago! We began development of Swirl Connect in late 2005, released it to the market in 2007, and the launch was met with a lukewarm response unfortunately. But the industry is all aflutter with the Google latitude release — not all of it good, of course. They are being met with the same criticisms that we were met with: primarily privacy and safety concerns. I would guess they’ve done a bit better job at implementation there. 
We learned many valuable lessons in deploying Swirl Connect, and one of the big ones is that innovation, hard work, and time to market can be trumped by dollars and market reach. It’s an obvious conclusion, but one that is frequently ignored by aspiring ISV’s who think that a good idea and a little luck can create the next big thing.
I still believe that to be true, but I think next time we’ll need to be a bit luckier!
Thanks to everyone who has used Swirl Connect in the past. While the software is not going away, it is going away in its present form. While development on this software is low priority for us, we are attempting to migrate this to open source, so if you’re interested in joining an open source mobile project, give us a holler.
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