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For some time, the rumour has been that Facebook will soon launch a geolocation to their service. According to Mashable and Advertising Age, the location service can be rolled out any day now. It was expected that Facebook would present it at the F8 Developers Conference, where they against odds only spoke of the social web.
The new service is going to be a serious threat to Foursquare and Gowalla, which are gaining foothold as location-based services with a gaming element added to them. Facebook plan to offer their new service to marketers and McDonald’s will be the first to make use of the service. The fast food chain is building an application that allows users to check in at their restaurants with a featured product to appear in the post. I guess several enterprises are already planning and preparing on how to make use of the new functionality.
With Facebook’s huge extent of users it will be interesting to see what impact it will have on the users. The potentials are certainly promising solely because of the scope of Facebook. But will people see the real value of keeping track of where their friends are? I don’t necessarily think that the average Facebook user feels inclined to check in at every venue the go to. People who are using for instance Foursquare have chosen to get on board the service themselves, but this is not the case for Facebook users. As with any other new technology it will probably take some time for people to adapt and make use of it.
Nonetheless, the marketing possibilities are hard to escape and I think it is just a matter of time before we see other initiatives like the one McDonald’s is rolling out.
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