by MG Siegler
Over the past several weeks, there’s been a lot of speculation about Facebook’s location functionality. At least part of that speculation can end now. We now know what Facebook is planning to launch with regard to location shortly, because it’s right there in their code.
Specifically, it’s right there in the JavaScript on the touch.facebook.com version of the site. This is the mobile version of Facebook that is optimized for phones with touchscreens like the iPhone and Android phones. Visiting this site on the Safari web browser (which, of course, the iPhone uses a version of) causes something interesting to happen: it just hangs. And when you enable debug mode, it’s easy to see why.
This touch version of Facebook’s site is attempting to populate something called the “places_tab.” Unfortunately, Facebook hasn’t enabled that yet, so it throws the error. While that alone is interesting, much more interesting is what you find when you dig deeper into this JavaScript.
Based on the code, this is what it seems that Facebook is about to launch: A mobile version of the site using the HTML5 location component to grab your location information from your phone. Once it does that, you’re taken to this new Places area of Facebook that presumably will have a list of venues around you. From here you can click a button to check-in. Yes, there will be check-ins.
But it’s slightly more interesting than that as well. Facebook will record not only your latitude and longitude, but also your altitude, heading, and speed, according to this code (and assuming they can get all of that information). It will also record the accuracy of the location measurement. I’m just speculating here, but perhaps that will help curb cheating that has begun to run rampant on other location services like Foursquare. [...]
