Don’t tell me you couldn’t see this one coming: Facebook will begin allowing location-based status updates as early as next month, according Nick Bilton’s report on the Bits Blog. The plan, apparently, is to unveil the feature at f8, the company’s annual developer’s conference.
While the move will initially be seen as Facebook’s attempt to compete with the growing activity on check-in based services like Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, the ultimate motive is more threatening to local media companies. Bilton writes that Facebook “wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising.” Facebook has made a steady push during the last year toward attracting small businesses and now hosts more than 1.5 million local businesses from around the world (according to Facebook).
Will location sharing serve as Facebook’s trump card? It depends on whether its users and developers take advantage.
“It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information,” Frederic Lardinois writes on ReadWriteWeb. “While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far.”