Facebook location sharing coming soon

As early as next month, Facebook may give users ability to share location in status updates

Facebook users will soon be able to share their current location with each other, possibly as early as next month.

Facebook plans to reveal the new feature at its annual developer conference, f8, taking place in San Francisco at the end of April, according to a post by Nick Bilton on the New York Times Bits Blog.

The report, which is based on a source speaking on condition of anonymity, says that Facebook has been working on these location-based features for nearly a year, but decided to hold off the unveiling until the company believed the public was ready to adopt the changes. Two-tiered, the update will not only allow users to broadcast their location, but will also give developers access to a set of APIs to base their own location services off of.

Nick Bilton pulled out an interesting location-related addition to the new privacy policy instated in November:

"When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post," reads the new Facebook privacy policy. "If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate."

Obviously, the company knows it has choose its steps carefully in rolling out a feature like location sharing, in order to dodge the deluge of highly likely privacy complaints to arise. Facebok has plenty of experience with such reactions. It seems that any time the company changes anything about the social service, community response ranges anywhere from floods of groups demanding the "old Facebook back" to heavy criticisms throughout the blog community. Eventually, however, much of the dissent dies away as Facebook fixes any serious issues and users adapt to the changes.

Though Facebook remains tight-lipped about any upcoming changes, a representative says the company constantly experiments with "new things."