There's a new tool out that wants to provide a real-time geolocation services to anyone interested in letting the whole world know where they are at any given moment. It's called Loki, and it's basically a mashup of Google Maps and the cool WiFi location-finding technology from Skyhook Wireless, the company that provides GPS-like functionality to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

By installing the Loki toolbar and clicking on "Locate me", the toolbar uses your WiFi antenna to ping local hotspots and triangulate your location. This information is then fed to Loki, which updates your location status. If there aren't any WiFi hotspots nearby, you can update your location manually through their website. But that's not nearly as cool as the automatic feature. Check it out:

Before turning on my WiFi antenna:

After turning WiFi antenna on:

Zooming in, we can see exactly how precise this technology is:

I could zoom in futher, but trust me, it's extremely accurate, probably to within 10 meters.

So why is this exciting? Well, combine this technology with a microblogging tool like Twitter, and you have yourself a geo-journal, able to track your actions and location over time. If you're the kind of person who worries about being abducted by aliens, MIB, or say, kidnappers, you'll immediately see the benefits. Obviously family and authorities will find this data-trail of immense value. But there's another group who will find this data even more exciting: marketers.

You had to see this coming. This kind of tech is extremely appealing to advertisers and marketers who will see it as an opportunity to geo-target ads, especially if you can contextualise them by combining location data with the content of a user's Twitter-stream. I'm guessing that is the real reason why this service was launched.