I'm tracking my wife, Karen. I never know where she goes during the day, and I've had enough.
Using Glympse, a new application that's embedded on two cellphones she's carrying in her purse, I can watch her every movement from my cellphone or desktop computer.
As I write this, a map shows her driving through our neighborhood on the way to make her rounds as a visiting nurse. Wait. She just entered the highway. She's doing 70 miles an hour.
Really? Seventy?
"Now I'm not," she said, via cellphone (hands-free, of course). "I'm getting off the exit."
I checked again. "Right. You're going 37 now."
"Very exciting."
Cellphone companies have for years marketed location-sharing services, where people can track your physical movements whenever you have the device turned on.
If it strikes you as strange that anyone would want to broadcast that information all the time, or even much of the time, you've just touched on a chief reason I've generally avoided these apps, like a lot of other people. And even if you like sharing your location with a viewing audience, your viewers must first sign up for the same service and hope their phones are compatible.
Glympse solves the creepiness issue, and while you still need T-Mobile's G1 to broadcast your whereabouts, any Web-enabled phone or PC can receive and display your location information. The broadcasting app is also coming soon to iPhones, Windows Mobile phones, BlackBerrys and other devices, and it is promising enough that such people should keep it on their radar.
Here's how it works. First, buy a G1 from T-Mobile — which, if you happen to live in an area where T-Mobile's coverage is good, is a fine idea. The phone's selection of add-on applications isn't nearly as big as the iPhone's, but it is decent and growing quickly.
You can find Glympse in the Android Market, the G1's answer to Apple's App Store. After downloading the app, you can send your whereabouts to anyone who can receive SMS messages or e-mail.
When you want someone to know where you are — say, if you're on your way to a meeting or coming home from work — you open the app and enter the phone number or e-mail address of the person with whom you'd like to share that information.
If the creepiness quotient is still too high for you, Glympse takes care of that problem with the next step. Users can select the length of time recipients can track them. The default is 30 minutes, but you can extend that to as long as four hours.
You can include your destination — if, for instance, you're headed somewhere other than the location of the recipient. And you can also add a message or select one of several scripted phrases to include, like "Stuck in traffic," or "I'll meet you in the lobby."
Click "send," and as long as your recipient has Web access on their phone (or whatever device on which they receive your message), they can call up a Glympse Web page showing exactly where you are, and your speed.
This is bad news for people like me, who've grown dependent on the "got stuck in traffic" excuse when I actually just started off late. But otherwise, it's a good way to save multiple phone calls while you're in transit. Send someone a Glympse message, and they can track your progress as often as they like.
