Location-aware websites scare us silly

Google Street View car
Who's following you using geo-tagging?

We're not ones to miss a good time-wasting opportunity, so we've spent most of this morning using the new, improved Google Street View to look at the houses we used to live in and to sneer at our exes' choice of curtains. But Google's not the only firm on a geolocation tip. Everybody's at it.

You've been able to say where you're tweeting from for some time, but Twitter has added mapping to the main Twitter website. Where Twitter goes Facebook inevitably follows, and the social network will unveil its own location features at next month's F8 conference. Then there's the new breed of location-based sites and services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, and HTML5's built-in geolocation support.

Carrie Marshall

Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.