Check in from seat 34C with Gogo’s in-flight location service

Keep reading — this isn’t a totally stupid waste of technology.

Gogo, provider of in-flight Wi-Fi on airplanes, has teamed up with location-sharing app Glympse to let you post your checkins from the sky.

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If this were just social media nonsense, we’d have written it off three sentences ago. However, this is the kind of one-to-one location-sharing that lets your loved ones track your movement through the sky, all the better to pick you up from the airport with.

This will also save you the “don’t worry, terrorists didn’t take down the plane” post-flight call to Grandma.

Here’s how in-flight Glympse works: Open the Glympse mobile app or website. Enter a U.S. or Canada phone number for a friend or loved one or person you want to stalk you. The recipient will be able to see your status and location as well as a dynamically updated ETA for the rest of the flight — even if you power down your devices or close the app.

Nifty, huh?

Glympse reps tell us that third-party devs/apps/companies using the Glympse platform will also be able to share in-flight location data from their own apps. This includes SMS texts and website location widgets.

The service will launch on November 8, 2013, for Android, and iOS in-flight features will launch next week.