Facebook to Launch Location Features
Having already conquered the whole "real-time" thing, the next step for social networking is clearly the location-based arena. Though currently dominated by Foursquare, there's still a huge amount of headway left to be made in this market.
Twitter has already announced API support for contextual locations (as opposed to longitude-latitude data). Now Facebook has announced that they've been developing location features, which will launch next month.
Facebook will allow users to broadcast their location directly through the site itself and through API support for applications like Foursquare, Loopt, and more. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of applications taking advantage of this, some more successfully than others.
It appears that they want to work with and not in direct competition with smaller companies like the aforementioned Foursquare and Loopt. Instead, they'll be taking on Google, making an effort to compete with their location-based search capabilities.
Personally, I'm most excited by the ability to locate people flooding my news feed with Farmville updates so I can track them down and kill them.
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