To be able to use any social networking services, it is very essential to have good location based service. In that direction, there are many things that need to be taken care of, not all of them pleasing the users. Google Latitude, from the well known internet Search Engine giant Google, is in the industry long enough to study people and t o understand that Location Alerts is a touchy subject for users. It used to be quite annoying [although it is not in use anymore], to learn of the whereabouts of your friends even if you did not ask for it.
This is what Google had to say: “The experimental Location Alerts [beta] app was retired in December 2010. Retiring features is always a tough decision to take, but part of building experimental features is picking the best ones on which to focus. Rest assured, we are continuing to develop apps such as location History as well as location API to enable the developer community to create even more ways fro you to use latitude.”
It may seem very neat on paper, but actually it is not very practical. Whether or not the user opts to receive location alerts, he/she still gets notifying mails of their friends’ movements, in case that friend chooses to make use of this feature. One other probability could be that users get unusual location alerts, about some place where their friends generally never went to! Now I wonder, if it’s really dead !!