Pretty exciting news for iPhone or Android owners, as Google has now announced that over 1.5 million public domain (i.e. free) books are already available in the United States. From the article:

Users can go to http://books.google.com/m on their mobile browser to search for a title, author or subject and start reading while on the go.

Additionally,
users can browse the list of "Featured books" and various categories
such as business and economics, the Classics, science and math,
and travel. Once they have picked out a book, users can easily get back
to their selections by clicking on the "Recently viewed books" under
the "My books" section.

This follows the ongoing trend of more and more services going mobile, which seems to be becoming much bigger in 2009. In fact, we are moving towards a direction where the mobile version of a service is becoming (or has already become) a standard, and we are finally beginning to see some truly mobile-fueled services.

So much so, that some of the newest services coming out bring out a mobile version first and their desktop/web version follows. One such case is Google Latitude, a new Google service recently announced, that allows you to 'see where your friends are on a map'. 

The desktop version is still not available here in Greece ( Google says this, when you add the widget to iGoogle:

The Latitude iGoogle gadget is not currently available for your location :(


You can still download Google Maps with Latitude to your phone :)


Click here to learn more or goto m.google.com/latitude

This is one of the first and few Google services that were made available on mobile first, before the desktop version. Admittedly, though Google can and does estimate your current location using triangulation from the antennas, they still haven't got Google Latitude working on the widest range of mobiles yet (yes, that's J2ME, not iPhone :) ). You can view the location of your friends if you (and they) manually set your(their) location, but I guess this is work in progress and pretty soon this widget will be available worldwide.

I know there are plenty of social networks that already provide similar services, but a Google service is always worth special mention. I think it will actually be pretty cool once everyone starts using it. One of the first things people ask when they call each other is 'where are you?' and knowing the other person's location beforehand might actually change the way people communicate with each other.