Keeping your friends close
Details about Facebook's long expected move towards location based services emerged this week. Facebook is apparently delaying an official announcement for the April f8 developer's conference but the blog Inside Facebook made an educated guess as to how LBS would work on Facebook.com and through the API. There have been a lot of posts about the giants (Facebook, Google) squashing foursquare and Gowalla but Techcrunch reported that Facebook is more likely to work with the startups than against them. Tagging the location of users on a large privacy challenged service like Facebook is probably as dangerous as it sounds. Switched.com marked the expected increase in Facebook's stalker quotient and predicted a boom for location tracking malware this summer.
Where is Twitter? This week they (somewhat quietly) enabled location based Tweets through the GoogleMaps API. The effort seemed rushed and a bit off target. Venture Beat explained how Twitter missed the mark, especially when compared to the recent Google Buzz effort.
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