wheresitworking?

Geolocation Coming to Facebook?

It’s funny to look back on this post I wrote just 8 months ago, about location based social networks and Google’s launch of Latitude. I didn’t even mention Loopt in the post, though at one point during late spring through summer Loopt looked poised to be a leader in the space.

But a fickle bunch we social networkers are. During summer, foursquare became the hottest way to tell your friends that you were having lunch somewhere. At least among the more geeky, or trendy, or connected, people I follow and communicate with. Meanwhile, Twitter has just rolled out geolocation through their API.

Jason Kincaid wrote a great post yesterday on how Facebook is poised to rollout and dominate geolocation. While I agree with him for the most part, it is hard to consider what will become of Loopt, foursquare, Gowalla (another up-and-comer with seemingly significant momentum), Brightkite (relative old-timer in the space), or the other networks that have sprung up and have some traction. Will their users abandon them for the major networks, or will they be acquired by the bigger players for their customer user bases and individually unique features? Obviously it will be a combination of these things, but I’m guessing a lot more of the former than the latter.

One final thought: what is Google doing with Latitude? Definitely not sitting still; just recently geohistory and some other new Latitude features were pushed out. Seems like with Google’s massive penetration in the mobile phone space, and their recent push of Google Profiles and various other networking components, they are an impending giant in this space.

Tags: brightkite, foursquare, geohistory, Google Latitude, Loopt