Facebook Places Is Here!
What were you doing last Wednesday night? Well, if you’re a social media geek like the folks at Step Ahead Inc., you may have been watching the Facebook Places announcement on Facebook Live.
That’s right, the long awaited geo-location tool from Facebook is now live throughout the United States. Facebook will roll out Places to the rest of the world soon.
So, what is Places? It’s a geo-location tool that’s similar to Foursquare and Gowalla. Places allows Facebook users to update their status and tag friends via their smart phone while updating their location as well.
Facebook released an updated version of the Facebook iPhone app with the Places feature prominently placed in the center of the screen on Wednesday, as well. But if you don’t have an iPhone, don’t worry, you can just use the Facebook touch mobile site (http://touch.facebook.com/). Once you have the Places interface open, you can add places, check into places that already exist, and tag people who are with you.
Now the big question is privacy. Facebook doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to privacy, so during the live announcement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this feature isn’t about sharing your location with the world; it’s about finding places and sharing them with your friends.
Be aware that your check-ins will appear by default on your profile, in the news feed and in the activity stream for that place, and that your friends can check you in without your permission, unless you’ve updated your privacy settings.
Places offers a huge new geo-location audience to businesses. Businesses can claim their Places page, which will allow the owner to post updates to people who like the page and update business information. Claiming a Places page requires some work by business owner, including submitting the business name, URL, address of the business, Federal EIN (Employee Identification Number), and an upload of an official document (articles of certificate of incorporation, certificate of formation, local business license or Better Business Bureau accreditation).
So now that Facebook has introduced geo-location to its 500+ million users, is this the end of Foursquare, which is nearing just three million users? In our minds, no, but that’s a whole other blog post.
….except for the fact that if you don’t have a touchscreen, you’re apparently not important enough to Facebook. No Facebook Places for you!
I just don’t see myself doing this until it is integrated with the Droid app. Thought Mark was Team Droid now? Also, it’s good that you have to go through so many steps to claim a place. That is a big problem with Foursquare–there are too many duplicates and “fake” places.