Palo Alto, California — Another day, another fascinating yet controversial Facebook feature. Facebook is attempting to stop the progress of a number of smaller rivals by unveiling a service to allow its members to tell their friends exactly where they are at any given time. If Facebook Places catches on with the company’s 500 million users, Facebook could be sitting on a gold mine of local business listings that advertisers and users will love and Google will hate.
Moving to challenge Google and other emerging location-based services, Facebook on Wednesday evening, held a small press event to announce the location-specific application — to be known as “Places” — this new feature that lets users to “check in” to a location in the real world, post content about that place, and let friends find them more easily, is aimed at turning the tide of users who are increasingly using rival applications such as FourSquare and Gowalla.
With this newly released location sharing capabilities, Facebook intends to redraw the local search map. Although neither is anywhere close to the size of Facebook — FourSquare has 2m members for example — the development reflects the social networking giant’s desire not to lose users to a growing social phenomenon, which has grown in tandem with smartphone usage.
Places empowers users to “check in” to certain venues — such as shops, restaurants or pubs — and instantly tell all their friends where they are.
The business concept behind such applications is that all these individual check-ins can be utilized to steer advertising in a number of ways. Either adverts can be targeted more specifically because a user’s spending habits are known, or the venues themselves can be lured into deals to attract more users.
On FourSquare for instance, a user who checks in to a specific shop or bar more times than any other becomes the “mayor” of that venue. Part of FourSquare’s business strategy that involves encouraging venues to give discounts to such mayors.
For Facebook, embarking onto such a competitive marketplace from a position of dominance can only mean bad news for the smaller players.
“Facebook will now become the platform on which other check-in applications like FourSquare will be built,” wrote Henry Blodget, the technology analyst turned blogger on his Business Insider website.
“FourSquare, Gowalla and other pioneers in the check-in business are now likely to become ancillary applications with more limited appeal,” he continued.
The application will initially function through the site’s iPhone application, while owners of other smartphones will have to visit the company’s website via their handsets to check in.
Although both FourSquare and Gowalla allow users to do the same — by permitting to broadcast their movements on Facebook — they can also choose to tell only friends using the same application.
Places allows users to “check in” to certain venues, such as shops, restaurants or pubs, and instantly tell all their friends where they are Photo: Getty Images
Facebook Places is slowly rolling out to users in the U.S., and first to users who live in or near major metropolitan areas, but is working to make it more widely available.
Facebook 3.2 for iPhone and iPod touch adds a new Places icon to the app’s main screen, enabling users to check into locations and view their friends’s check-ins.
Facebook 3.2 is available now for free in the App Store, and it requires iOS 3.0 or later.