Facebook Bringing Location Awareness To Its iPhone App?

Imran Hussain | 945 Views

Facebook had rolled out its iPhone App just a few days ago, even though it already has an iPhone compatible Facebook website. The Facebook App brought many features such as Facebook Chat and Facebook mobile upload for your camera snaps. One important point mentioned in the Facebook Blog post on the launch of Facebook for iPhone was the development of location awareness capabilites in the App.

According to Joe Hewitt:

The first version of Facebook for iPhone is just a glimpse of the future. For instance, the iPhone has the ability to find where you are located, and we are looking for ways to let you opt-in to share your location and discover nearby friends. We’re developing this and several other exciting new features that we’ll release in the coming months.

This could mean a potential setback for Facebook’s competitor, MySpace, who had also released its iPhone App, which although wasn’t on par with the former, but still announced its presence in the mobile social networking arena. This will also threaten the usage of Loopt which enables users to broadcast their status to a broad set of services and find interesting locations and reviews nearby. And if the Facebook for iPhone App is enabled with the facility to let Facebook Apps work on it, this will mean doom for the market that others are trying to capture. As taking advantage of the iPhone’s GPS and the beloved UI, developers would be able to compete with other Apps, no matter what their target market would be. As already seen with Facebook, developers have made all kinds of applications. And if we take a cue from Facebook’s mobile website ( m.facebook.com ), then the other exciting features could include the extension of Facebook for iPhone App through Facebook Applications.

This is just a wild guess though. We’ve contacted Joe Hewitt for more information on this. So we could very well be wrong. But one thing is for sure, with location awareness coming for the Facebook App, it’ll put a serious dent in the market share of other Facebook location aware Apps.

Facebook company profile provided by TradeVibes

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