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Facebook Could Go Local

By know, I’m almost certain you’ve heard of FourSquare or Gowalla.  You may recall I introduced what I like to call the “new social media” or “location based networking”, back in Januaryand just at the beginning of the month I told you about a business who used FourSquare to increase their profits by 110%.

Now it seems that Facebook wants to get on board by allowing people to add their location onto their Facebook profiles.  Although there are no official plans to add the feature to join the number one site in the US, the company said in a blog post on Friday afternoon they have ideas which are very exciting.   

“The last time we updated the Privacy Policy, we included language describing a location feature we might build in the future. At that point, we thought the primary use would be to ‘add a location to something you post.’ Now, we’ve got some different ideas that we think are even more exciting,” the post said.  No other details were released.

In the past year, posting your location to your mobile device, along with your status message and web link has become popular within the social networking community. 

Earlier in the month, The New York Timesreported that a few inside sources had told them that the social network would at least unveil the location based feature at f8, an annual conference for Facebook application developers in mid-April.

“This could make Fan Pages for restaurants a lot richer and maybe even competitive to Google’s Place Pages or Yelp’s listings,” said Kim-Mai Cutlershe wrote in her blog.

“If you could tag an update or post with a venue, you probably attach comments, mini-reviews and photos to the Fan Page.”