In February we launched Google Latitude, a service that lets you to see where your friends are and what they're up to, while allowing you to maintain very fine-grained control over how your location is seen by the people you care about.

Today, we're bringing Latitude to the iPhone and iPod touch as a web application accessible by going to google.com/latitude from the Safari browser. To easily access Latitude, try creating a home screen link using Safari's "+" icon.

Check out the Google Mobile Blog to learn more.

Mat Balez, Product Manager, Google Mobile Team

Many of you have asked for it and it's finally here. With over 5 million sites using Google Friend Connect to awaken and strengthen their communities, we wanted to make it easier for those of you who prefer languages other than English to take full advantage of it. Today, we are happy to announce that Friend Connect is supported in 47 additional languages.

As a site owner, you can view google.com/friendconnect in any of these languages, which should make setting up your site much more intuitive. Better yet, you can now choose the language of your site (which can be different for each of your sites). Once selected, most Google-created gadgets and any translated third party gadgets on your site will automatically render in that language. This ensures that the Friend Connect gadgets are better integrated into your site and easily understood by your visitors. Visit the gadget gallery to see which gadgets are available in your language.


Friend Connect is now supported in Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Go to google.com/friendconnect to set up your site. Or if you're developing gadgets for Friend Connect, make sure to check out the documentation on localizing OpenSocial applications.

Posted by Sami Shalabi, Technical Lead, Google Friend Connect

From time to time, we'd like to highlight some news from around the social web. In case you missed it, here are two stories that have crossed our radar:

• Netlog and Google Friend Connect - Netlog used the open standards of OpenID and OAuth to integrate with Friend Connect, allowing their users to sign into Friend Connect with their Netlog credentials, use their Netlog profiles, and more.

• OpenSocial apps on orkut - OpenSocial apps on orkut now have popularity and usage statistics on the "application info" page and can be found by category.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect