Facebook launches Location Features in January

The new move of Facebook into location was inevitable for quite a long time and now the company seems to make it official and reveal it in the coming month at the developer conference of Facebook - f8.

The company will incorporate the location feature in a couple of ways: the first one being its own features for the sharing of location and the second will employ some APIs to let the other apps like Gowalla and Foursquare that will offer the location services to the users of Facebook.

Facebook will presumable ensure the address privacy issues that are associated with the location features. These issues may involve the unveiling of the settings that will allow the users to share the location alone with a certain group of friends. These details are not known much as the company has updated the privacy policy in the last year as a preparation of the location launch.

Facebook will roll out the location features to a large user base that consist more than about 400 million users overall in the network. Of these 400 million, about 100 million access the social network from their mobile in a regular basis. The social network has appropriate apps that enable the access from a wide range of mobile platforms.

The competition is not between the likes of Gowalla and Foursquare but it is between the Google and its enormous base of the local small business advertisers. The startups will surely not ignore this great opportunity. As Facebook is now entering this space, the others will have to look in ways to create their own ways to increase their value.