Finally Facebook’s Geo-Location Feature Is Here

The world’s largest social network is placing itself to be the hub for all location-based services. Facebook today exposed a service that makes it simpler for users to share their location with other people, making a deeper push into a fast-developing market pioneered by Foursquare Labs Inc.

Michael Eyal Sharon from Facebook Team announced =

Starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places. You can share where you are and the friends you’re with in real time from your mobile device.

You have the option to share your location by “checking in” to that place and letting friends know where you are. You can easily see if any of your friends have also chosen to check in nearby, he added

A Places application for iPhone handsets was released, and social network members with smartphones with Web browser software that supports geo-location and HTML5 could use Places at the mobile website touch.facebook.com. ‘If you are not in the US you can still see if friends are using it here but you will not be able to check-in,’ Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said at a festive Places launch event at the firm’s headquarters in Northern California.

Facebook said it plans to eventually extend the feature to all smartphones and to the social networks more than 500 million members worldwide. As if expected recoil that seems to come with each change at Facebook, executives and engineers there stressed that privacy was being respected and that users control how location information is shared.