Facebook users can expect a location-based service soon. This new service will allow Facebook’s 400 million plus users to see the locations of their friends in addition to their status updates.

The new service is expected to be released during the Facebook’s f8 developer conference, to be held in late April.

According to a report in The New York Times, the new service will let users share their location in their status updates, as well as see the location of their friends.

Facebook is also going to make API’s available to third-party developers, which they can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.

This is a kind of service that is or is similar to the service provided by Loopt and FourSquare for quite some time now. Google Buzz also offers the same, but got itself into a mess of lawsuits over privacy violations. Twitter, has also added an option to share location data with messages.

Facebook have been working on location-based service for over a year now, but is taking the time to make sure everything is ready before they roll out the service. One important issue Facebook is taking into account is how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, which is a staggering 400 million.

As an precaution for the new service, Facebook has updated its privacy policy last November, which now states: “When you share your location with other or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

The service is expected to be an opt-in – users have to agree to share their location information – which will certainly help stem some privacy concerns.

Facebook announced the date of next year’s F8 conference: April 21-22, to be held in San Francisco. F8 is an event where Facebook showcase their latest developer products.

This is a big event because Facebook’s past two F8 conferences have marked the debut of some of its biggest products.

In May 2007, Facebook launched the groundbreaking Facebook developer platform, which spurred the creation of around 500,000 applications so far. The 2008 F8 saw the debut of Facebook Connect, that reaches over 60 million users each month.

We can all expect the launch of something big in the upcoming F8 conference in April 2010.

Though nothing much is known about the products that might get launched, we’ll surely keep you updated as more details and rumors is available. So, stay tuned till then .

[Source: Facebook blog]