According to Nick Bilton of the New York Times, Facebook is aiming to “take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8″. This confirms details that were first provided by Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. Given that location-based services are increasingly the center of attention in the social media space, it’s not surprising that news about Facebook’s new location product has been leaking out recently.
At f8, the company is expected to announced new location-based APIs. At this point the location product will become the center of an immense amount of speculation. Will this service be a complete replacement for Foursquare and Gowalla? The New York Times suggests it won’t. Will it integrate mapping functionality (in which you can view where your friends are on a map)? Will it be launched through the company’s mobile applications?
With more than 100 million mobile users, Facebook is making a hard push in the mobile space and is being forced to quickly eliminate the threat of competitors, who are beginning to gain significant traction. With Facebook having a world class design team, I can only begin to imagine some of the opportunities available to Facebook.
Will their be a gaming aspect to the application (i.e. badges, icons, etc)? In order to avoid the comparisons to big brother (and minority-report like services), Facebook is reportedly making the service opt-in. Aside from knowing that people can share their location and that developers will be able to build on top of the location-based services, there are few other details.
With location-based services expected to be the center of attention at SXSW, which begins this week, it looks as though this year could be the year that location services really take off.
Foursquare offers much more than what Facebook can release and would set a bad precedent for Facebook to cannibalize such a popular app such as F/S.
2nd to last paragraph, ‘their’ should be ‘there’
Wow, couldn’t disagree more Andy. Really? You think Foursquare offers a lot? Its a pretty basic service. Seriously? You think Facebook couldn’t duplicate and improve on what 4s does?
Andy Clibanoff, did FourSquare just pay you to say that?
Oh come on, 4square comment.That comment is embarrasing for you.
William and Tom - right on guys. Foursquare has 450,000 users worldwide, and frankly, gets the exposure of something 10x that size. I would love to see what Facebook could come up with. There are too many products coming out that are getting pushed “as the next best thing” without enough critical response from the social media world. Foursquare, right now, is one of those products.
@Jinto: I didn’t see any grammar errors.
I’m WAY behind on technology, obviously. Is this supposed to be some sort of GPS-locator service? I hope that they don’t screw up the “opt-in” offer with “opt-out”, like they did with Beacon. That might bring facebook-stalking to a whole new level…
Please tell me that this will be an opt-in service rather than active for everyone across the board. I have no need or desire to share my location, and shudder to think what dangers it may open up for some users. No thank you, Facebook.
Well, to back up up my call - it’s now been thre months and 4s is up near 2million MAU and FB has nothing yet. What imams like is the 4s revenue model which has a leg up on fb. Plus fb reputation for privacy getting lower than low despite the fact they actually are very progressive thinking.
Like Tom asked three months ago…
“Andy Clibanoff, did FourSquare just pay you to say that?”