A World with Location enabled Facebook

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Apr 10, 2010 in Default | 2 comments

Geo Social Networking and Location based services and applications are all the buzz these days. Not only do we have applications like FourSquare and Gowalla and the many others battling it out for the top spot in this category, Twitter and Firefox also enabled the ability to determine the location of a user. The future of Social Networking has started to look increasingly ‘local’. But what is the biggest social player doing about it?

Facebook, right now, doesn’t have any location features but there has been an increase in chatter about it unveiling something at it’s developer conference – F8 – that takes place at the end of April.

So what can a world with a location enabled Facebook look like?

Let me paint you a picture with a use case

I’ve been invited to a party and I have RSVP-ed yes. If it were FourSquare, I would simply check in to the venue and be notified of other friends who may have checked in there. But Facebook might let me check into an event or the fanpage of a venue, or an event at the fanpage. In this manner, Facebook instantly takes a huge jump to real time event information. I can then check how many of those that RSVP-ed yes, have arrived at the event.

My status updates from the venue can be geo/event/fanpage tagged and people can see what I’m saying about the event in real time. Think hashtags for Twitter.

I’ve taken a few pictures and I put them up on Facebook. I can tag the album with the location/event/fanpage. Facebook can then populate photo albums of an event or venue and have them put up and suddenly I’m seeing everyone elses pictures from the event too. This saves me the trouble of going through 5 different albums for the same event.

By increasing integration between the various modules of Facebook (Events/Status Updates/Albums/Fan Pages)  and adding a location element to it, Facebook can make location based networking that much more useful for people. This in contrast to the points/mayor system that Foursquare currently offers, the excitement for which may soon fade away.

Of course privacy becomes an issue but there’s no reason why the current system cannot be tweaked to facilitate this.

This may just be an idea in works, or it may just be a dream; either way if Facebook is to play its cards right it can really go places in the Location game.

I apologize for the weak pun.

Related posts:

1. Geo-Networking as the next step in Social Networks
2. The idea of ‘Relevant’ Social networks
3. Facebook: What it is and what I want it to be.
4. Twitter to Facebook: Thanks, but no thanks.
5. Get your Facebook events on Outlook and your Mobile Device