Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location
Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends. — Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook enters the move with unusual strength: leaked figures put 2009 revenue at $700 million, the company says it turned free-cash-flow positive last September, and it has already displaced MySpace atop social networking. The rollout lands mid 'location war': on the same day this story broke, TechCrunch framed Twitter switching on website geolocation as timed for exactly that fight, and Silicon Alley Insider carried Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley arguing that Facebook 'isn't for real life friends anymore' — a claim this feature directly tests.
The announcement also follows within days of Facebook removing application notifications, which developers say cut their traffic sharply within 24 hours — a reminder that when Facebook adds a feed surface, it decides which third parties reach it.
First-order effects
- More than 400 million users could start seeing friends' current locations in their news feeds next month, making place a default update type rather than an opt-in behavior on separate apps.
- Foursquare and Twitter lose the 'check-ins live elsewhere' differentiation: Crowley's argument that Facebook users aren't real-life friends gets put to a direct product test against a feed that surfaces where people actually are.
Second-order effects
- Dedicated check-in services face a distribution problem: if Facebook ships location natively, their growth depends on offering depth — games, rewards, merchant deals — that a plain feed update does not.
- Local merchants and advertisers gain a plausible new targeting layer inside Facebook, whose own platform decisions — like the notification cutoff that hit developer traffic — show how tightly it controls access to any new data type.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standalone location startups risk being demoted from products to features, with the major social platforms competing on who owns the permission boundary around always-on location sharing.
- Location becoming a mainstream feed primitive pushes privacy expectations toward explicit, granular user control — a norm the largest network will effectively set for the rest of the industry.
The trend: Social networks are absorbing location sharing from dedicated check-in startups, turning place from a standalone product into a feed feature whose scale winner sets the privacy defaults.