JoeTrippi.com

Location based services are one of the next big features that will revolutionize mobile technology and online social networking. There are a number of services that are already capitalizing on geolocation capabilities such as Gowalla, Loopt, and Foursquare. However, with the market share that Facebook already holds in the social network sphere, it may be poised to overtake these other services in the near future. TechCrunch explores what Facebook could do with a location feature and why it could be big:

There are two obvious ways Facebook could treat location. It can act as a direct competitor to services like Loopt, Foursquare, and the rest by allowing you to directly check into locations from your phone or via the web. Or, it could serve as something of a central hub for location that third parties could update via an API. In other words, updating a service like Foursquare could then update your Facebook location.

It seems likely that Facebook will wind up doing both. Twitter is already trying to become the central hub for geo-positioned status updates through its own API, and Facebook isn’t going to give that up without a fight. Given Facebook’s moves to bolster its other API functions, I think it’s safe to say they’ll be allowing developers to push a user’s geolocation from their service or app into Facebook.

Facebook would be foolish to rely exclusively on third parties as a source of location data. Many people update their status messages and photos exclusively through Facebook.com and their official mobile applications, probably without realizing they have other options. The big question is what form this native location functionality that appears within Facebook will take. Facebook could simply allow people to geotag their status updates in the same way that Twitter does. Or it could adopt a robust location feature that more closely resembles Foursquare and Loopt.

Read more on TechCrunch.com.