One of the hottest trends right now is the rise of location-based services (LBS), which helps friends network and find each other based on their location. Foursquare and Loopt are prime examples of these growing networks. Google has its own LBS service as well: Google Latitude

In an age where privacy is becoming increasingly hard to come by, the British government is further hastening its demise for citizens in the UK.

One of the core philosophies of Google, and one of the reasons it has been so successful, is efficiency. It’s about both being as efficient as possible when serving search results and processing data and creating product that push the limits of efficiency for the user (as an example, Google’s trying to make communication more efficient with Google Wave ). Maybe that’s why we’re not surprised that Google is finally looking to tackle the underpinning code that runs the web