As expected, Facebook today launched their new Places feature on touch.facebook.com and in their iPhone app. With it, you’ll be able to check in to places, tag yourself with your friends and share what you’re doing there. You’ll get push notifications if you have friends nearby and be able to see who else is checked in with you. Checkins will also show up in your friends’ Facebook news feeds. In almost every respect, it’s foursquare minus the gaming elements.
Facebook, of course, rolled out partners to show they’re not trying to crush the companies that came before them. Gowalla and Yelp spoke of their upcoming integrations that will be launched soon. Foursquare, on the other hand, spoke of ways their product will differentiate itself from Facebook’s with the coming foursquare 2.0. Their integration with Facebook was almost an afterthought, left to Vice President of Mobile and Partnerships Holger Luedorf’s final sentence on stage. It appeared as though foursquare was behind the eight ball compared to Gowalla and Yelp, with Luedorf suggesting they’re interested in finding ways to integrate foursquare with Facebook Places and not mentioning any concrete plans.
Will Facebook Places be a foursquare killer? In short, no. Foursquare will continue to differentiate themselves with their gaming elements. They know that users have tired of badges, points and mayorships, so they’ve been working on foursquare 2.0 for months. It will take the game to a whole new level. All that will integrate directly with Facebook Places in a “richer way” than they currently do.
Facebook Places brings the idea of checkins to the mainstream, which helps apps like foursquare and Gowalla, who’ve been struggling to introduce location sharing to larger audiences. They will be using Facebook to help them grow, as their gaming elements appear across the Facebook ecosystem and users become more comfortable with “checking in.”
It will be interesting to see how foursquare integrates with Facebook Places. What do you think of Facebook Places? How do you think it will impact foursquare?
Here’s a video from Facebook about the new Places feature:
UPDATE (8/19): And now we know why foursquare didn’t have anything to announce: they weren’t given advance access to the Facebook Places API. It’s also unclear if they knew Gowalla, Booyah and Yelp had been given access and were planning to announce their integrations.
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#1 by CC on August 18, 2010 - 10:03 pm
1. What video?
2. Why does every news report I read say that FB has launched this and it’s accessible from touch.facebook.com but I cannot find it? Am I the only one?
#2 by Chris Thompson on August 18, 2010 - 10:11 pm
1) There should be a video. It’s working fine in Firefox and Safari for me. What browser are you using?
2) As with all Facebook rollouts, it’s happening on a staggered basis. A small percentage of their users will have it tonight, and it will come to other accounts over the next few weeks.
#3 by CC on August 18, 2010 - 10:17 pm
I’m using Firefox.
I just opened up Safari and see it over there.
I guess it doesn’t surprise me about the stagger; they’ve done that a lot. Then again, I still can’t find the FB Questions feature, nor the auto-suggest status update, so I guess I was starting to believe that FB is just starting to make up random things and pretend to launch them.
#4 by Lahatiel on August 18, 2010 - 10:14 pm
U.S.-only to start and even at that, they said it’s not immediately available to every single U.S. user — but their plan is to include every U.S. FB user within “a few days.”
#5 by Michael Bauser on August 18, 2010 - 10:21 pm
You’re drinking the Kool-Aid again, Chris. “It will take the game to a whole new level?” Did Foursquare’s PR person write that paragraph for you?
Anyway, I’m reserving judgement on this until I see Places and the Foursquare integration in action. Right now, it looks like Facebook is giving itself the advantage of being able to tag any Facebook friend in a checkin, whereas Foursquare can only “tag” Foursquare friends who have also checked in. Facebook’s checkin service will be more viral than Foursquare’s, since users will pretty much be forced to look at the app being used to tag them.
On the other hand, Facebook may discover what Twitter discovered when it added GPS coordinates to tweets: Most users don’t want to share location in realtime, period. (Twitter gets what? 1% of tweets geotagged?) The final “winner” of a Facebook/Foursquare face-off may come down to a tricky question:
Which is more valuable to advertisers — A Facebook-sized userbase that barely uses the checkin service, or a Foursquare-sized userbase who uses it all the time?
#6 by Chris Thompson on August 18, 2010 - 10:33 pm
There’s no doubt I’ve drunk a little Kool-Aid, but in watching everything that’s been said about what’s coming at foursquare, I really do think it’s going to be a game-changer…if they ever get there. They’ve spent so much time fighting the uptime battle that they’re about to let their best opportunity to wow people pass them by. Many early adopters have already abandoned the platform.
I think location sharing is something that will take time for people to get used to. It’s really still in its infancy. I remember my parents saying years ago that they never wanted a cell phone because it was too much of an intrusion in their lives. Like the rest of us, they now can’t live without theirs.
Facebook jumping into the location sharing game will help to advance its adoption among the general public. It may be 1% next year, but it will jump to 2% the year after that, then 4% and so on. Facebook doesn’t need it to happen any faster than that; this is a play for the long term, not a way to hop on the latest fad.
#7 by CC on August 18, 2010 - 10:25 pm
Also, a lot of people will block the Places feature on FB. I know my friends despise the check ins from 4Sq spamming their feed. 4Sq is opt-in. Nearly all the users on 4Sq want to see the updates. And the exact opposite: Facebook will only be opt-out, in reality.
What good does that do for me, a venue “owner” when I know that a ton of people are blocking the entire app? Not to mention that I’d rather have my customers’ check-ins be welcomed, and not looked upon as an annoyance. I don’t need my business being a contributor to, or associated with, spam.
#8 by Michael on August 19, 2010 - 10:31 am
I wouldn’t say that nearly all of 4s users want to see updates on their Facebook and Twitter. Many people who use the service find them annoying. The only place I, personally, want to see where my friends checked in is on the app.
#9 by CC on August 19, 2010 - 12:44 pm
No no, I meant that 4sq users can see their friends’ updates on 4sq. I definitely don’t need it on my twitter and fb feed also. That was my original point. Too much overlap on these things.
#10 by Kirk Fink on August 19, 2010 - 3:14 am
Images the targeting data they will have with this new Facebook Places. They know all your personal data, what your friends are like, what you say and now where you go!
#11 by Michael Bauser on August 19, 2010 - 7:44 pm
…and they still can’t target advertisements worth a damn. I’m an atheist whose constantly being bombarded with “Christian Singles” ads.
I keep waiting for Facebook’s long-prophesied Advertising Singularity to occur, bombarding me with ads so finely targeted as to be irresistable, but it never happens. I’m beginning to think Facebook is chasing a data fantasy there.
#12 by mrstone on August 19, 2010 - 9:48 am
By the way, did the foursquare team notice something odd about the new facebook places logo?
Some tweeps think there is a hidden symbol in it: the streets on a map draw the number 4 (you know, just like in the word 4-square).
http://graphism.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/4squarebook.jpg
Weird, isn’t it?
#13 by angela on August 19, 2010 - 11:54 am
will fb be making places accessible via their Blackberry app? if not, not useful to me. Not everyone has an iPhone…
#14 by Chris Thompson on August 19, 2010 - 12:42 pm
Yes, it will eventually come to BB and Android. For now, touch.facebook.com is your best bet. They had to start somewhere.