Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook have all stepped up their location-based services. The most comprehensive - just by its size and presence - is Facebook. The social networking site will be introducing a new location-based feature in late April at its yearly developer conference, according to the New York Times. The new location feature will have two elements, the Times says: a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends and a set of APIs that developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.

Next Steps

Facebook has plenty of company in this space. Twitter is experimenting with a geolocation feature and Foursquare is planning to offer a free analytics tool and dashboard for business owners, according to eWeek, which also notes that Google as well is heavily invested in the future of location and social networking.

Clearly it will only be a matter of time before geo-location information is ubiquitous across the web, says Elad Gil, a cofounder of GeoAPI. "Location is where social media was eight years ago," says Gil. "Now social media is integrated into every website–geo will be the same." (via Technology Review). However there are still some missing pieces or challenges that need to be solved before this data can be truly useful to marketers. For starters, devices must know exactly where they are - a feat that requires more than just harnessing satellite positioning information.

The second challenge is how to translate geolocation data into something meaningful to the user, such as "San Francisco, California" or "The Googleplex.", the Technology Review says. It points to SimpleGEO, which offers a service that turns latitude and longitude information into addresses, but applications like this are only a partial solution. The company is in talks with providers of geo-data to make their libraries of data available to developers, and ultimately users. "If you had an interesting location data set, you could feed into our system and resell it," says Cofounder Jeff Stump. "We're creating iTunes for geo-data."