Like a lot of things that wound up clumsily rolled into Google+ location sharing actually existed pre-Google+ in the form of Latitude (which came out of Dodgeba

Like a lot of things that wound up clumsily rolled into Google+ location sharing actually existed pre-Google+ in the form of Latitude (which came out of Dodgeball originally). And as with other things smushed into Google+ at one point or another (see Voice, Reader, Picasa, etc), a lot of users of the old thing will tell you that the old thing was actually superior to what wound up in Google+. In the case of Latitude you could easily share the information in a general way to all of Google Maps which covered a lot more platforms than Google+ itself does.