Last night Facebook announced their play in the location-based network space (called Facebook Places) which opens the door for 500 million+ potential users to start “checking in” to real-world locations, something that only 1% of U.S. adults are currently doing with networks like Foursquare and Gowalla.
This move brings “check-in” behavior to the masses.
After watching the live video announcement, a couple of things stuck out to me. Let’s digest the business and personal implications.
Location Sorting
Foursquare and Gowalla serve up listings of nearby locations based on where you’re standing, but Facebook adds another ingredient to the proximity algorithm: Nearby places it thinks are most interesting to you. Facebook can do this because it sits on mountains of data about our lives and interests. For example, if you’re male and way into comic books, Facebook knows this, and it will potentially add more importance to the comic book shop two blocks away instead of the bridal store one block away. If a mainstream audience takes to Places, this is another step towards Facebook becoming one of the most powerful marketing platforms of all time – right up there with Google.
Targeted demographic data of users + their real-world hang-out overlay = marketer’s holy grail.
Privacy
Facebook gets beat up about privacy issues all the time and I feel like they’ve learned some lessons with this launch. To paraphrase one of the presenters, Places is “not about broadcasting your location to the world, it’s about sharing your location with friends.” You can switch your setting to share your location updates with everyone, but by default Facebook allows you to share with friends only. However, friends can tag you in their location updates – you’ll have to manually turn this feature off if you don’t like it.
Side rant: To me, privacy is a personal life management issue. It’s about having control over the flow of your information. Most people don’t realize that social networks have matured over the years to give you multiple layers of privacy controls and settings. My response to anyone hand-wringing about the privacy implications of Facebook Places or Foursquare would be to get educated on the privacy settings and the network’s terms of use, or simply don’t use these features.
If you need a walk-through, Wayne Sutton has already posted a great step-by-step guide to adjusting your Facebook Places privacy settings.
Partnerships
During the launch, Facebook announced key partnerships with Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and Booyah’s MyTown. Many of us were wondering if the Places product would be a competitor to these services, but for now it looks as if they’re going to be friends – or at least acquaintances. This “blessing” by Facebook doesn’t put the other guys (Loopt, Brightkite and Whrrl) in a very good spot. Even if check-ins become a commodity across multiple platforms, this won’t negatively impact Facebook as long as they already have the massive user base and the most data.
What do you think about Facebook Places? Be sure to leave your comments below. Here are a few thoughts from tweeps in my network:
Comments