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Facebook ready to launch Location Based Services

There has been alot of competition lately location-based services (LBS) market (applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite) and that has now sparked interested from Facebook

Twitter has just launched their own Twitter location features showing they too want to capitalise on this rapidly expanding segment.

That moves the whole Twitter service one step close to a location based service like Foursquare and Gowalla.

There has been rumor that Facebook will create their own location features for months now. As to what exactly Facebook is doing in the location arena has been unknown, but now Facebook has officially announced their plans.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given more details about their location plans at a Developer Garage event in London. This was the first developer conference outside of the US.

Mark commented: ‘We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon’ he told the conference in regard to the soon to be released geolocation app and related features.

Facebook now says it has been working on these features for a considerable time, but they are not going to be new ideas or ‘revolutionary.’

It looks as though the Facebook features will tie in well with existing Location Based Services.

Twitter recently launched Places, its own style on location services. This allows users to check into various locations and display that location tagged on Tweet. The Twitter service also works with Foursquare and Gowalla. It looks like Facebook may follow a similar approach.

Facebook’s location features were initially scheduled for a launch around April, however possible due to the privacy issues Facebook has delayed the plans. It is thought many other projects were put on hold due to the privacy issues.

Now the dust has settled in regards to the Facebook privacy controversies we can expect to see new product launches by Facebook – with this location services launch highly anticipated by both users and developers.

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