Where Are You? Facebook Gets in the Location Game and Launches ‘Places’

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last week, you’ve probably heard that Facebook launched their much-anticipated location-based feature, aptly named Facebook Places. 

Tag, You’re It... Or What Places Brings to the Table

What sets Facebook Places apart from other location-based check-in applications like Foursquare (or Gowalla or Yelp)? According to CEO Mark Zuckerburg, it’s the tagging.

When you check-in, you can tag your friends at a location with you, much like you can currently tag friends in pictures and status updates. Of course, it wouldn’t be Facebook if there wasn’t some privacy concerns. Even the ACLU took note, posting a list of grievances immediately following Facebook’s Places announcement.

You can turn the tagging option off, but will have to jump through a couple of hoops first. While the option of who sees your check-ins is right on the main privacy page, you won’t find the option to disable friends checking you in places until you click the ‘customize settings’ option ( and if you’ve never looked into these settings, I strongly suggest you do. Know what you’re sharing!).

Taking it to Heart

While many check-in applications choose to focus on the game aspect (i.e. Gowalla’s swag, Foursquare’s badges), Facebook is trying to reach something even more innate than your competitive side... your love for nostalgia. 

The web is permanent. Your memories are there for you to relive; for your friends, your family and yes, even your children to relive (anyone else think it is awfully lofty of Facebook to assume my kids will be checking Facebook?). Facebook emphasized this point at the official Places announcement, as well as in this promotional video. 

Changing the Game... Or Just Playing It?

Is Facebook Places really innovative? Is it adding anything to our online experience? Susan Etlinger and Charlene Li of The Altimeter seem to think so:

“By introducing location awareness to Facebook, the company has added a critical layer to the online experience–who, what, when, and now where you and your friends are. In doing so, it has brought the online experience one step closer to the way people interact in the real world.”

But is that really Facebook’s doing? I would argue that it is mobile technology that takes the online experience into the real world (location-based check-ins of any kind are pretty useless if you don’t have a smartphone to check-in on, right?).

Places lets you check-in... which you could already do with other services.
Places gives businesses a page.... which we already had with Facebook Fan Pages (and before that, Groups. And before that, Profiles).
Places allows you to see who is visiting your same location... which we could already do by checking other location-based applications.
Places lets you relive your past.... which you could have already done by looking back at your other social media feeds.

The only thing Facebook really has going for them is their 500 million users... that are now, by default, Places users as well. That number pretty much blows Foursquare, the former ‘mayor’ of the location game, and its almost 3 million users out of the water.

Garret Murray addresses this in his post, ‘The Problem with Facebook’s Places’:

“They are slowly incorporating the features from every other independent web application on the internet. This is not inherently a problem—companies get bigger and they begin to have the resources to widen their feature set—the issue is that Facebook doesn’t do these features any better. They win simply due to how many users they have. It feels like mass-produced mediocrity.”

So, is Places really innovative? Or is it just Facebook’s way of getting in on the location game?

I’m going to go with the latter. Facebook may have taken over as the leader in location-based check-ins in one fell swoop, but their service isn’t innovative... It’s more like ‘inevitable.’

Danielle Hohmeier writes about marketing and design in the digital world for Atomicdust, with a focus on marketing convergence and social media.