I used Waze for the first time last week while driving from Baltimore, MD to our cabin in Maine. My wife was at the cabin and I told her about trying out Waze. I suggested she try logging into my newly created account and see if she could monitor where I was. She couldn’t find me on the map, either due to the fact that she didn’t know exactly where I was (we hadn’t really synchronized that closely) or due to the “noise” on the live map. Perhaps the feature exists and I couldn’t explain to her how to find me. If it does not exist, this would be a nice feature to have, being able to follow your loved one while they are on the road.
It can be done. Your best bet, especially on a long trip, is to also use foursquare, twitter, and/or facebook (with accounts for you and her) and check in every now and then. This will narrow her search down to a reasonable area. For privacy reasons, your location will be a few minutes stale on the map and depending on the number of wazers and how busy the server is, you may not appear at all. I have a friend several states away that will ping me occasionally and liven up my trips.
At some level of zoom in the live map will stop displaying wazers. The live map also displaces the current location as well. However you can use a second login and phone and scroll around on the client map, it shows wazers at any zoom level and their actual location roughly every two minutes.
I did this same thing recently and due to many factors, current actual location tracking is not possible in Waze. The client view on your phone will give a much closer location than the livemap will. Just too much data to present quickly and of course, privacy issues abound as well.
There’s been a thread opened within the last few days this was discussed in as well. Potentially a future waze feature to open your location up to anyone/friends. The data load on the Waze servers sending real-time data to clients would increase dramatically, potentially increasing infrastructure costs as well.
I was thinking it would be nice to have a feature like this also. I’ve used an app on my Android (from kor.im) that allows someone to send me a text message with a user-defined code in it that returns an automatic response regarding my location and estimated speed (although it frequently hyper-exaggerates the speed). I’d like to see such a feature in Waze, where you could set a personal text code for your loved ones to get a reply from Waze, including location, speed, and ETA (if navigating).