Find My Friends
Sometimes you do want to be found or even tracked. There is an iOS (read iPhone/iPad) app for that. It was announced with some fanfare with the latest version of the Apple operating system. While the service is probably mostly used by family members to track each other, it has a temporary tracking feature which looks like it might be useful in a number of professional environments. You can for example, choose to create an event around a conference, meeting or other company event that allows several colleagues to keep track of each other for a limited time. I tested this feature out over the weekend with several friends and it worked swimmingly. For the several hours we all agreed to, we could easily find each other and even though we were meeting in a place I was not at all familiar with, I could see on a map where everyone was gathered and then walk right to them. We were not sharing location information publicly and we shared it only for the timeframe we needed it. When the appointed hour past, it all evaporated and we went back to our normal privacy settings. There are a number of apps that handle mutual location tracking in a variety of ways, but I really did like the simplicity of this app. If it supported Android phones as well, it would be a great solution to staying connected with colleagues in a professional manner. As it is, it’s still pretty useful.