As my colleague David Gelles wrote earlier today, Facebook has finally announced its long-expected location service, Places. It’s only available in the US so far but the rest of the world should be getting it through Facebook’s iPhone app and touchscreen site in the next few months.
Places provides very similar a service to the “check in” function provided by Foursquare – which turned down a Facebook takeover earlier this year – but with Facebook’s trademark simplicity and clean design. The main enhancement is that Facebook users can tell the site when their friends are with them at a bar or school, in the same way they can tag them in photos.
It’s a big moment for Facebook, but also for the check-in itself, which alongside the Like button is quickly becoming one of the internet’s most common ways to interact. As well as Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and other location-based services, you can now check-in to the TV show you’re watching (through Miso) or even the dinner you’re eating (thorough Foodspotting).
It’ll be interesting to see if Facebook widens its use of the check-in – which by definition is an opt-in way of letting people know what you’re doing, in contrast to much of the web’s behavioural targeting.
For now though, it’s all about Places. Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal has been allowed to road-test the service and in general is clicking the Like button. He seems to prefer the lack of “annoying” game-like features – like mayorships, points and badges – that make Foursquare so addictive for many of its users.
Much of Facebook’s blog post outlining the service focuses on the privacy controls, but that hasn’t stopped many of the headlines today highlighting the potential pitfalls of revealing your location to the online world.
ACLU, a Californian civil liberties group, notes that Facebook defaults to enabling people to see when you’re “here now” if anything in your profile is set visible to “everybody”. Facebook argues the “here now” feature is no different to people seeing you somewhere in real life.
But making places you check into visible to friends only from the outset – thus having people opt in to greater sharing – is a default which many would like to see applied more widely across the site.
Meanwhile, much of the online chatter has been about whether this will crush Foursquare, Gowalla, Rummble and the legion of other location-based services that started to take off this year. Facebook’s allowing people to sync their badges or check-in data with such services.
TechCrunch wryly highlights that that landgrab may be demonstrated by the inclusion of number 4 within in the square Places logo.
On Twitter, Glyn Britton, of London ad agency Albion, makes an interesting point about the awareness of privacy issues among users of these different services:6
“My Foursquare friends are limited to people who ‘get’ privacy. Not all my Facebook Friends do, so I won’t be using Places.”
Foursquare has already tried to pre-emptively play the privacy card by adding more options to its information sharing settings.
Before the tech press writes yet another obituary, it’s worth remembering that tens of millions of people still seem to use Flickr, in spite of Facebook’s photo-sharing capabilities, one of its most popular features. Admittedly, Flickr had longer to build up a loyal user base before Facebook came along, while Foursquare still has fewer than 3m users.
If you want to watch the whole launch video for Facebook Places, it’s available now on another new addition to the site, Facebook Live.
