Everyone watching the web tech industry knew it had to happen eventually. Facebook is finally going to become ‘location-aware.’
Following hot on the heels of Twitter’s push for location information, Facebook will soon give you the option of attaching your physical location (in the real world) to anything you say, share, or post.
The New York Times broke the news that Facebook will officially announce the feature at the upcoming developers conference next month. They pointed out that Facebook has been prepared for this release for months. Last November the website adjusted their user policy to add the following:
“When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”
So now, persumably, people can know what bar you uploaded those sketchy pictures from, or where you’re sitting, killing time.
This technology will mostly affect those people accessing Facebook from their mobile devices. Since Facebook has a native app for almost every Blackberry, iPhone, and Android device on the market, that’s a lot of users right away. Some estimate Facebook has over 100 million mobile users already, and that’s only going to rise.
In previous statements to the media, the social networking company has explained that this will be an opt-in/opt-out program. So users should have the ability to decide who sees their location, and when. But until the system is released, we can only speculate how difficult that opting-out process will be.
