Share Your Location in Real Time via Cell Phone

Nextel's been putting GPS receivers in its cell phones for years. Now you can finally do something useful with that receiver: Broadcast your location in real-time, thanks to Mologogo, a free service.

The requirements are pretty specific: You need a Nextel (or Boost) phone, Java, and a GPS receiver on the handset (a list of supported phones is available here). Just download the Mologogo software to your phone (you also need a data cable to connect to your PC), and you can share your location with other Mologogo users with Mologogo-enabled cell phones or via the Web. You can also limit the information to go only to your "friends."

While the privacy dangers here are pretty extreme (the site even recommends "fauxjacking" by planting a Mologogo cell phone on an unsuspecting person you wish to track), it also has genuinely useful features, whether you want to keep tabs on a child or coordinate a sales force in real time. Another idea: Canvassing a city with fliers or door-to-door salespeople. A central manager could watch where all canvassers are and call them to update the paths they take if one person is moving slower or faster than the rest.