Gadgetory

not everyone is crazy about sharing their location and checking into places on their phone but when you're at a convention or a theme park sharing your exact spot with friends and family can be really useful I'm here at CES 2013 at the Las Vegas Convention Center and I thought it would be a perfect time to show you how to keep track of friends now Apple has its own app called find my friends and it's a great app but the only problem with this is that it's only good for iOS devices and I'm guessing that not all your friends have iPhones so the better option is an oldie but a goodie Google Latitude reason being I OS and Android users can use it now I'm sure you're already familiar with this app but today I'll show you some best practices for sharing your location with Google Latitude to get started download and install the app on your iOS or Android device when you launch it you'll have to login with your Google account then the first thing you'll want to do is start adding friends so go ahead and hit the add friend button I'll do that here on my Android and you can either select them from your contact or enter their email address just make sure to enter a gmail address so I've already gone ahead and added a few friends that I'm tracking here at CES but the first thing you'll want to do is adjust privacy settings specific to those contacts so for example I'll select Chris and hit manage sharing here you'll have three options you can select share best available location which means that Google Maps will try to provide them with the most specific location possible or share only city level location that'll give them an approximate idea of where you are or you can say hide from front so for example if you're having a night out on the town and you don't want your colleagues to know where you are you can select that option so in this case I'll select share best available location once you have all of your friends set up head back to the map now if all your friends have granted access to their location you'll see them on your map so you can zoom in scroll around find out where they are and you'll notice that each avatar has a square around it a blue square with an arrow means that they're reporting their exact location and they've reported it pretty recently a grey square means that they haven't reported their location in quite some time if their avatar has a circle around it it means that Google is trying to find out where they are and if their avatar has a blue or grey square around it without a little arrow it means that they are sharing their location with you but only at city level so now you're tracking all your friends you can tap on their face and you'll get a couple options one of them is to get directions to where they are so hit directions maps will launch and you can get the exact route to where they are so now that you know how to make the most of Google Latitude hopefully you'll have a better way to track your friends when you're at crazy places like CES if you have any questions along the way hit me up on Twitter for cnet.com I'm Sharon Vaknin