14 DAY TRIAL // There’s increased competition on the location-based services (LBS) market and there’s enough hype to get the big boys involved. Twitter has just launched a new location feature that moves it even closer to a full-blown LBS like Foursquare or Gowalla. And Facebook has been rumored to come up with its own location features for months now. Those features have now finally been confirmed officially and, apparently, they’re coming soon.
The confirmation comes from CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself who was attending a Facebook Developer Garage event in London. It was the first developer event outside of the US and it seems to have gone without a hitch. But a remark made to the audience of developers was interesting to everyone else as well, Facebook is putting the finishing touches on the highly anticipated location features.
“We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon,” he told the audience referring to an upcoming geolocation app and related features. The social network now says it has been working on these features for quite a while, but they’re not going to be ‘revolutionary.’ In fact, it seems that the new location features will play well with existing dedicated services.
Twitter has recently unveiled Places, its own take on location services. It enables users to check into various locations, but it works with Foursquare and Gowalla as well. This looks like the approach is also favored by Facebook.
Facebook’s location features were initially slated for an April launch. However, plans were delayed and the new product wasn’t even revealed at the f8 developers conference, as it had been widely expected. Later, the privacy fiasco had the company scrambling to come up with an answer, so most projects were put on hold. Now that everything has settled, the new features are finally ready for a public launch, which should be coming soon enough.