Aug 17, 2010 07:06 GMT  ·  By

Facebook is said to finally be unveiling its location-based service, which has been in development for quite a while now. While the company hasn’t said anything officially, Facebook is holding a press event tomorrow and speculation is that the new location feature will take center stage.

The specifics of the geo-location feature are still unknown, but rumors say it will be a rather complete product which will allow users to ‘check in’ as well as tag their posts and photos with their location.

The interesting thing is that it is designed to also allow third-party services to tap into the feature through dedicated APIs. What this means is that people will be able to check in with Foursquare, Gowalla and so on, and their activity will show up on Facebook as well.

Location services are one of the hottest things on the web at the moment. Their popularity is growing, but their potential is much bigger than what has been achieved so far. Most people agree that location and geo-tagging will play a big role in the future of the web, especially with the rise in mobile use.

Several startups have built products around location, most notably Foursquare which works more like a game. Users can check in at different locations and become ‘mayors’ if they are frequent visitors.

They also get rewards and badges for various types of locations. The game aspects as well as the ease of use has made Foursquare very popular, doubling its user base in a matter of months.

This lead to a lot of interest in the startup and several acquisition attempts. Yahoo was prepared to pay over $100 million for Foursquare and so was Facebook. Neither company succeeded, Foursquare opted for private funding instead.

But Facebook, which was already working on its location feature, moved on and is now ready to unveil its product. Whatever it is, it has a guaranteed user base, thanks to the more than 500 million people who use the social network, unless Facebook really messes up.