A key point that's not emphasized in the article is the extremely large amount of data we use for our algorithms. We collect 3 orders of magnitude more data than other similar apps - 300M+ data points of high resolution location data are used to determine relevant content.
Sure I'd be happy to! We collect location data that might help determine what's interesting content for you to see - such as where you spend time with friends, where you take pictures, etc.
By similar apps I meant other location sharing applications - whether they're check-in style apps or other passive location sharing apps. These other applications, usually in an attempt to reduce battery drain, collect data at a much lower rate. Our relay framework lets us collect lots of data without sacrificing battery performance, letting us make much more informed decisions for what's interesting and what's not.
Latitude's biggest problem is its battery drain. It's hard to get through a whole day without your phone dying, which is a real dealbreaker for location sharing services. We really bought into the concept of Latitude but found it just didn't work well enough, which is why we ended up building Glassmap in the first place.
Glassmap also takes a bit of a different approach and focuses more on encouraging social interactions. We let you import friends from any/all your social networks - really helpful for those of us who don't want to bother rebuilding yet another social graph - and also have a lot more social features (pictures/filters/commenting/messaging) as opposed to the straight utility approach that Latitude takes.
