I’ve espoused the virtues of Latitude as it relates to my Home Automation obsession.  While Google’s Location service once provided a critical means to validate home/way state, it was always critical in the determination of “occupant prediction” – that is, setting up a home-automation posture in anticipation of homeward-bound residents.

It’s no news anymore that Google is shuttering Latitude on August 9th.  It’s something that I predicted on my twitter feed, and I wasn’t alone in feeling that the end was near.

Google attempted to placate the masses by adding a Location feature to Google+, but from a developer perspective it was the retirement of the Latitude API that hurt the most – never mind the giveth/taketh soreness that has come out of Google’s decision to maintain Location History but close it off to 3rd-party developers going forward.

Whatever.  That ship has sailed (or soon will).  The bigger question for me was – how the heck do I keep location-awareness as a staple in my home-automation system?

I was pretty sure that 3rd-party solutions would crop up, ala the Google Reader debacle.  But unlike RSS feeds, there’s something very personal about location data.  Obviously I was (am) placing a large amount of trust in Google to hand over my location data to them, but I was very loathe to do the same for any other entity on the face of the planet.

So I enlisted my go-to man Tasker to fill the void.

Tasker always had a close relationship with Latify on my smartphone.  Tasker would determine which of three Latify profiles were most suitable at any given time.  So it wasn’t a huge stretch to rip out Latify and have Tasker poll location itself, sending that information to my home server so it could Do Something(tm).

And in a nutshell… that’s all there is to it.  With the help of the Tasker App Factory, I’ve produced an .apk that’s been installed on the wifey’s phone and – voila – the home automation system will remain location-aware after August 9.

So that’s part one.  And a very important part it is.

Part two encompasses what to do about sharing location information with friends, whcih is what one traditionally thinks of when they think of Google Latitude.  And in all honesty, I’ve only ever really seen that as valuable in the context of family, where each member probably wants to know where the other is for safety reasons.  To that end I whipped together a page on my intranet which takes Tasker’s reported location data and puts it on a lovely map.  As with all things intranet, this page is accessible from the Internet at large – for authorized users – and works on a laptop as well as it does on a smartphone.  It uses the Google Maps API for all the map-py stuff, AJAX so that locations update dynamically, and it’s generally Very Cool(tm).

So there it is – I’m quite happy with the current solution.  So a heartfelt “Thanks!” to Google for $crewing developers the world over once again.