Facebook Announces “Places”

Facebook for college admissions: Facebook Places

Facebook Places a “skunkworks” project last year. But last December, the team came together around a specific vision to allow Facebook users to share where they are with their friends. Places was built on three premises:

Sharing where you are
Seeing who’s around you
Seeing what’s happening where you are

Check out this video explanation of Facebook Places called “Why to Check In?”

If a friend of yours stops nearby, Facebook will send you a notification. This allows you to have a serindipitous meetings more often, taking the online power of Facebook into the real world. Facebook hasn’t released Places until now because they wanted to nail down a good set of features separate from what location-based pioneers Foursquare and Gowalla offer. The tagging product that the team came up with is very different from anything you’ll see elsewhere.

Features Overview

Checking-in
Tagging friends
Seeing other people
Claiming Place Pages (for colleges, universities, and Page administrators)
Removing check-ins

Checking-in and Tagging Friends

When you check-in, you see a list of places around you. Another unique feature is that Places sorts the list based on what is most interesting to you, not just what’s nearby. At the same time, you can search for specific places nearby, or add a new place.

The privacy settings are set to “friends only” by default. You can always change this. Also, you can only tag your friends. And you can only tag your friends if you are checked-in at that place as well. You can remove any tag as well. They added the ability to let you opt-out of any person tagging you. Set the setting to “disabled.”

Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox made it clear that Places is not about broad activity with the world. It’s about sharing where you are with your friends. Checking-in at a place creates a news feed item on that place page. People don’t need to have an iPhone to take part in Places. People can tag their Facebook friends when Checking-in.

Place Pages

Each place page has a recent activity section, and has a news feed for each place, letting users interact with each story. On the web, there’s a “facepile” for each page, that lets you know all of your friends at a specific place.

Availability of Facebook Places

It’s available on the touch.facebook.com website and an iPhone. It is rolling out gradually from in the US first. iPhone app and Touch website. Not available to all 500M people initially. Get there as soon as they can. It will be visible on the web to everyone. If you’re not in the U.S., you can still see if your U.S. friends are using it. You just won’t be able to check-in.

Integration with Other Location-Based Services

Scott Raymond of Gowalla spoke about how Gowalla has had Facebook Platform and Connect support from day 1. For Gowalla users, the experience will largely remain the same. Stamp your passport, and choose to publish to Facebook or not. Your friends will be able to see the position on a map. Gowalla also allows you to add a photo to your check-in, and count towards the Facebook check-in as well.

Holger Luedorf, Mobile & Partnerships VP at Foursquare, spoke about the gaming element, badges, point systems, and familiarizing people with the concept of the check-in. Checking-in is at the core of Facebook Places, and they are excited to see it grow.

Eric Singley, Mobile Products Director at Yelp discussed the success of Yelp’s iPhone and Android App, and how they are pulling Facebook check-ins into the Yelp app.