Facebook on location

Facebook is set to announce in 3 weeks it's new location based platform for the web world to show your friends where you're going. It's hard to tell with Facebook where the hell it's going itself, tagging and posting nonsense is a great way to build communities but not so great as a business model.

If you look at the big 3, Microsoft/Apple/Google, they are coining money out of office/icrap/advertising at such a phenomenal rate the clock must surely be ticking for Facebook to pull out the finger. Facebook still occupies the "limbo" revenue categories with the rapidly-paling Twitter and the ghostly Amazon. So many users, so much potential, so little hard cash??

The new location feature is also being heralded as a direct attack on social location newcomers Foursquare. A social check-in company that is growing at rates last seen by twitter. Although this makes sense for a social network to expand into a location social network the tech world is littered with such disasters i.e.

• Microsofts efforts with Bing, a dominant company entering a seemingly capital-intensive market and falling on their knees.
• Googles efforts with Nexus One/Buzz, although I do agree with companies attempting to at least spread the web rather than a shitty app store.
• Anything that AOL ever did including AIM.

So the jury is still out for Facebook. Can social be profitable? They are making some cash but volumes of users ain't cheap. A social checkin/coupon app/planner app/AR app/(insert other location implementation here) won't really result in huge revenue for them as they've already missed the boat. The worrying part is that selling personal data to evil marketers (!!) is still the only realistic way to produce cash.