Facebook Just Commoditized Geo-location to Death

As we published earlier, Mark Zuckerberg officially denied the Facebook Phone rumor, explaining that the company will remain a “social” software developer… Then, he announced the release of its location APIs that will allow developers such as Yelp, Loopt or Gowalla to automatically feed the Facebook location platform with their users’ exact positions in space. Before, these type of applications were only updating the Facebook Feed with location information “in text”. Mark can be very happy: now all these developers will “work for him”… for free.

During the presentation he even showed a “Happy people” graph (see picture below), related to the Single Sign-on button launch: it will allow mobile users to sign-in once in the Facebook app and all the other mobile apps supporting the feature will not require them to login. Sam Altman, CEO, Loopt, had a hard time to make his demo work… Maybe it was the burden of knowing that he has just been “commoditized to death”… His app now basically gather data for Facebook, for free.

Android users will be happier today as the Facebook Android update is available now (it’s been lagging behind the iPhone version), although users are still complaining about the lack of Push Notifications.

Oh, and iPad users can keep waiting for a new app: Facebook’s CEO said that iPad is “not mobile”, so there’s no need for an app.

Eliane Fiolet
Categories: Top Stories, Web
Tags: api, Facebook, GPS