Not too surprising to see, and frankly not real yet … 9to5Mac reports on a patent that covers a pending piece of Apple tech to match and enhance the capabilities currently found in Latitude – at least on the surface. The goodies within the patent seem to indicate that geo-data will be able to extend to both sms and instant messages making it more of a system wide feature.
I’m hoping this leads to a more standard way to handle location data. Apple seems “good enough” to start as a source for handling this … I just hope it’s not restricted to Apple only things. That would be a very Nokia-like approach (Friendview anyone?) and one that while successful within it’s own world, would severely limit the opportunity. On second thought it does actually sound a lot like what’s baked into Nokia Chat Ovi Contacts.
