I don’t know about you, but I’m getting jazzed about the future of location aware services coming to our mobile devices. I know, I know, some have been out for a while, and it’s old hat in some European and Asian countries, but here, this surge in activity seems to be completely driven by two upcoming products: the iPhone 3G and Google’s Android platform.

Brightkite, Loopt, Whrrl, FireEagle – these all excite me. I had to do some research on another one Plazes, which Nokia bought today, and again, exciting stuff. If you haven’t yet, watch the little demo video with the cutesy characters on their main page.

The service, still in closed beta, asks users to create and spread word on their activities throughout the day. Other people around them can then see these activities and can decide to be social — as in the real kind, not the online social networking kind.

This seems to work exactly like Twitter, except that it has the location element built in to it. It’s a pain in the ass to update your current location so your friends will know. I do it occasionally on the current non-GPS Brightkite iPhone app right now – it’s tedious. If instead it automatically knew where I was and piped that data in (when I wanted it to of course), that would be brilliant.

Think about it for a local review service like Yelp as well. Imagine you’re in a new town, or a new area of your town and don’t know where to go, what to do – for food, entertainment, whatever. You could look it up right now on your phone, but what if your phone just automatically knew where you were, down to the street corner, and gave you places all around you with high ratings? Again, brilliant.

I know quite a few people are in the opposite boat. They worry about people knowing where they are at all times, but naturally these services are going to be opt-in only. If anyone ever found out that one was tracking you without your knowledge. The shit would hit the fan in a way we have perhaps never seen in so-called “web 2.0.”

Maybe I’m naive, but the excitement of such possibilities overwhelms any fear I have. Bring on LBS.