Facebook to Launch Location Features Next Month

Perhaps unsurprising, Facebook is apparently looking to launch its own location features and services to the site and will unveil it at the f8, Facebook's developers conference to be held in late April. Location has been one of the most hyped, new opportunities online and it looks like it is going mainstream, and fast. On Facebook, users will be able to share the location and find the current location of their friends.

The New York Time's Bits tech blog cites people familiar with the matter who claim the new service has been in the works for the past year or so, but that the social network is looking to get things right and waited until it believed the feature was ready for a large release. With 400 million Facebook users, 100 million of whom are coming from mobile devices, and all the privacy-related controversy that seems to be plaguing Facebook's every move, it was probably a very good decision.

Facebook's location feature will focus on two main areas. The first one will be the integration with the site, enabling users to share their location and also adding the location information to various parts of the site, presumably, things like status updates, photos and the likes.

However, Facebook will also release a powerful location API enabling third-party developers to take advantage of the features or offer their own location services. It's this latter detail that may prove Facebook's biggest advantage in the brewing location-services war. Facebook Connect is already incredibly popular and adding some location features to the API seems a given.

As for the aforementioned war, Facebook isn't considering services like Foursquare or Gowalla the real competition, in fact it's likely there will be some integration with them at some point, the real target is Google, unsurprisingly. The two web giants are fast becoming the biggest players online and, while Facebook is still smaller in terms of users and significantly smaller in terms of revenue, the social network has a very good position to threaten Google's dominance of all things web. [via NYT's Bits]