The post informed advertisers that they now had access to two of the most frequently requested targeting filters: language targeting and location targeting. Obviously, the language targeting makes sense, especially considering that Facebook is currently available in 40 languages with over 60 more in development. In fact, it's somewhat surprising that this feature was not available until now.

When a particular language is entered into a box on the ad signup form, the approximate reach of the selection will appear at the bottom. For example, if an advertiser enters in a location of "United States" and the language "Spanish," the approximate reach will display 1,081,820 - the number of Spanish-speaking Facebook users in the States.

Facebook Knows Where You Live

However, it's the location-based targeting which is the most interesting of the two updates. Here, advertisers can narrow their focus in order to target users within a certain mile radius of a particular location. This feature is currently available only in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for targeting cities and/or targeting within 10, 25, or 50 miles of the cities selected.

With this feature, advertisers can tap into the detailed demographics that Facebook users so willingly share along with their age, sex, relationship status, educational background, etc. (You didn't really think you were just filling that info out to share with friends, did you?)

Will Hyperlocal Ads Come Next?

As advertisers better learn to target narrower sets of users, we wonder if it's only a matter of time before Facebook introduces a mobile, location-based component to their network which would allow users share their exact (or nearly exact) location within a city. Imagine the possibilities for extreme hyperlocal ads then! What if advertisers could target all the users who updated how they were sipping lattes at Starbucks, for instance? Or perhaps the ads could target users who posted that they've checked in at a Vegas hotel for a big conference? These are the sorts of niche demographics that advertisers can only dream about now, but the technology already exists to enable that level of precision.

Today, a handful of early-adopters are currently sharing this type of information through Facebook's News Feed and status updates courtesy of the mobile social networking service Brightkite. If you're friends with any Brightkite users, you'll likely see the location updates pop into your feeds from time to time thanks to that service's ability to integrate with Facebook by way of Facebook Connect. This relatively new authentication technology allows users to log into the Brightkite service with their Facebook account and then shoot their updates from Brightkite back into their profiles. If Facebook advertisers could tap into the sort of niche demographics that Brightkite could give access to, it could open up a whole world of possibilities for hyperlocal ad targeting.

The only stumbling block to implementing this type of targeting is the same one that always comes up: those pesky users and their sense of privacy. Would Facebook users revolt if, all of a sudden, Facebook knew exactly where they were and served up ads that did too? The Facebook ads seem creepy enough now as they're often far more accurate and relevant than some users are comfortable with. What would hyperlocal ads look like then? Far creepier, we would imagine. "Do you really need that second Frappuccino? Why not head to the gym instead - it's only 3 blocks away!" Yikes.

But while it's true that some users would balk at that level of invasiveness, others would welcome it. In fact, Facebook is actively cultivating a sense among its users that going online is no longer a private activity. By tucking away their privacy controls deep within their settings, they're encouraging the average user to overshare personal information with people who would have never known them in that way before - people like mom, dad, and the boss, for example.

In time, the sense of openness Facebook fosters among a person's social - and perhaps professional - network will wear away at that sense of privacy until users aren't just tolerant of these hyperlocal ads, they will welcome them and they'll expect them. Google's recent foray into more targeted advertising will only help further this cause, too.

Of course, in this imagined scenario, Facebook users who want to maintain their privacy would be able to do so - they could just opt-out of the feature. But maintaining online privacy is something that will, over time, become harder and harder to do. There will be more settings to adjust, more configuring of block lists, and more checkboxes to mark. Most users won't bother with it - they will just adjust to the changes and to the new reality of the smarter (and yes, perhaps scarier) ads.

With the rise of smartphone-based computing, applications like Brightkite, Loopt, and others were slowly growing their user base, letting friends share posts, photos, and other information with each other as they moved from place to place out in the real world. Accessed via mobile applications or SMS, these sorts of networks provided the framework for connecting people to the places they visit.

However, it was too soon to determine whether mobile social networking was a space that would ever really take off. As studies showed, the social networks that most people accessed on the go were not specialized "mobile" networks, but the usual ones - Facebook and MySpace. Having to recreate a friend graph on new mobile social networks was not something everyone was up for...at least it hadn't been not so far.

Without any easy way to import MySpace and Facebook friends to these newer mobile networks (like via Facebook Connect for example), our mobile social networks were filled only with an odd mix of friends: some early adopters and maybe a handful of tech-obsessed locals. But that being said, the networks still had potential assuming they could have ever gotten over the initial hump to gather critical mass. They were offering something unique, and that boded well for them. Being able to tune into the world around you and see who was there, who had been there, and what was going on was a type of augmented reality that was never possible before the advent of modern mobile computing.

Google's Potential to Dominate

Now that Google has come onto the scene, friend graphs already intact, one has to wonder about the impact this will have on these smaller networks. How will they survive? Google is already a mainstream service and Latitude was just covered by the Wall Street Journal. Needless to say, any mainstream users out there intrigued by mobile social networking will now just go try Google's service.

Yet where the smaller networks had the cozy feel of you and handful of friends, any service maintained by a behemoth such as Google immediately has a "Big Brother" feel to it. No matter how many opt-out features and privacy controls they offer, some people just won't be able to shake that feeling that Google is just a little too omnipresent in our lives. But will "fear of Google" alone be enough to keep people from leaving the small mobile networks in favor of the larger one?

According to Martin May, Brightkite founder, though, Google didn't even come close to killing his service. "With Brightkite," he says, "we are primarily focused making meaningful connections with people you didn't necessarily know yet, around places. Latitude seems focused on showing you where your existing friends are at. Functionality-wise, Latitude does very little beyond sharing a latitude, longitude and accuracy with friends at the moment." But even May admits that may change down the road.

Wait...Our Real Friends Aren't on Google

What's strange about the mobile social networking market, though, are the missing players. The major missing players. Where is Facebook? Where is MySpace? Why is it that the biggest social networks on the planet have decidedly shunned any attempt to add proximity and mapping to their mobile services?

If anything our real friends are here, not on Google, whose friend network includes random people from our Gmail accounts, interesting folks from our RSS readers, and the occasional visitors to our blogs (thanks to the Google Friend Connect widget). Those may be people who we work with, people who wanted to share feeds with us, or fellow bloggers, but they aren't necessarily our real-life friends. And since they're not, why on earth would we want to share our locations with them?

The ability to connect to all our real-life, real-world friends and family - friends that include mainstream web users, mom, dad, and the kids - is something that just isn't here yet. No matter which mobile social network you end up using, including Google's, you're only going to see a slice of your actual social network. A true mobile social network would integrate friends from all the major social networks we participate in, plus our bevy of work colleagues from the social network hidden in our email, and, for all those non-participants out there, it would let us add them via their mobile phone number. But that really would be creepy, so we sort of hope it never happens.