I’ve probably talked enough about Google Latitude shutting down, especially since I rarely used it. But the truth is, it seems like location services in Google+ is going to be a really big thing.

Joe LaPenna, one of the Googlers who worked on Latitude for the past few years, plus one of the Googlers responsible for taking Latitude offline in the upcoming months, posted his thoughts on the topic on Google+.

The highlights include:

Google+ will be getting location sharing in a big way.
Latitude code is not being used, they are writing new code from scratch
The new code will be built with the mindset of not just building it into Google Maps “world where social is a layer across all of the Google experience.”
Google+ app will have latitude like features by the time latitude goes offline
You need to friend people on Google+ for this feature, so all your old Latitude friends have to be reset

Here is a snippet from Joe’s post, but you should read the whole thing.

Forum discussion at Google+.