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Nokia acquired location-based services company MetaCarta on Friday, a service with two distinct focuses: geosearch and geotagging. With MetaCarta's geosearch technology, the service finds content, data and information about a place and then presents it in a single mapped-based view using any map server, whether one from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ESRI or another company. The geotagging technology, on the other hand, lets MetaCarta pull geographic references from online content and then allow that information to be used in other applications.

Are location-based social networks privacy disasters waiting to happen? Or are the supposed "dangers" simply being overhyped by those without a thorough understanding of what these new networks can and cannot do? Today, these questions are the subject of a serious debate among early adopters - the group of people who are first to sign up for and try out the latest technology innovations, testing everything from iPads to mobile apps.

There are currently a number of location-based social networks clamoring for your attention, including earlier contenders like Loopt and Brightkite as well as the later-to-arrive, game-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla. Even user review site Yelp is getting in on the action. So is Google. And so is Facebook, apparently.

But is sharing your location with your online "friends" asking for trouble?

Earlier this week, Juniper Research published a report which said the market for location-based services (think mobile check-in games like Foursquare, social networks like Loopt, location-enabled apps like Google Maps, etc.) will bring in revenues of more than $12.7 billion by 2014. Spurring this growth are a number of factors, including the increased number of App Stores, handset improvements, access to high-speed mobile Internet and improvements to positioning technology.

While it's clear that location-based services are on the move, pinpointing a dollar amount to their market is a trickier subject. Has Juniper overestimated? U.K.-based consultancy Broadsight thinks so. "These numbers are way overstated," says firm co-founder Alan Patrick, who concludes that's it's far too early to tell the market's true size at this time.

Where's the nearest Starbucks? Where did my children go today after school? How do I get to that new Thai restaurant downtown? What are my friends saying about this new club? If you've ever asked yourself any of these questions or something similar, you were probably able to get the answers you needed just by picking up your mobile phone.

Thanks to the higher availability of GPS-enabled phones among other factors, the LBS (location-based services) market is about to boom big time. In fact, it already is. According to research firm Gartner, the market will more than double this year.