Facebook Places
Ok, well it’s been just over a year since FourSquare launched at SXSW 2009, and within days afterwards I am sure naysayers were saying, yeah that’s great but just wait till Facebook launches the same thing, and they’ll be toast. Well yesterday was that day…yesterday Facebook announced Facebook Places.
I am sure the details of what IT is will be reported all over the web, so I won’t go into all those details here… but I watched the video of the conference announcing it and major kudos to ex Socialight’er Michael Sharon (product mgr for Places) for what seems to be a nice well thought through execution… someone like Michael obviously “gets it” more than anyone, and I think that the feature will be a huge hit.
As a pretty passive user of Facebook, the thing I enjoy about it the most is the ability to easily keep tabs on friends… real friends that would often otherwise have been lost and mostly forgotten. Finding the latest pictures posted by childhood friends or hearing what people back home are up to, even if just occasionally, make it worthwhile to keep checking back in. And I think that the places feature will only enhance that. Is so and so still going out five nights a week, does anyone still go to so and so bar, does the old crew still hang out together? The stuff we did and the places we went were a big part of those relationships and Facebook Places has great potential to make those connections even stronger by adding places into the mix.
For the folks that use Facebook as a digital extension to their real time socializing, there is no doubt that tethering all of that to something that exists in the real world, a place, will be hugely popular. You can already see the potential:
• “OMG, did you see that Jennifer was out at 2a with Bob at the Waffle House?!”
• “Yo Greg, I see Sam is there with you, tell him he still owes me ten bucks! I am coming by in 30 minutes to collect!”
• ”I am bored, let me see where my friends are so we can meet up.”
• ”Look at how many times I’ve been to Joe’s Bar and Grill, they should make me mayor or something.”
While I’ve been a regular user of FourSquare, Gowalla and MyTown for a while, my biggest complaint with those services would have to be that there are so few people using them, and therefore the reason to use them and the benefit I got in return was often limited.
Facebook on the other hand may have the opposite problem, even as a pretty passive and conservative Facebook’er I’ve still accumulated 212 friends over the years, the vast majority of whom I would actually like to serendipitously meet up and have a drink with…. BUT if they live in California, Georgia or Florida and I am in NYC, there is only a very small handful of those 212 that I really want to see all their check-ins. For the others I’d certainly like to know if they’re nearby, but don’t really care if they went around the corner to their neighborhood bar in San Jose… sure I might like to look that up later if I am ever in San Jose… but to post every check in to my friend feed could very well turn it into meaningless noise, like my twitter feed, that I have to fight through to extract the relevant stuff.
I am not so sure that this means immediate termination for folks like Foursquare and Gowalla either. Will it likely alter their sky-is-the-limit trajectory, yes I think so, but when starting what is both a new business AND a new sector, it seems to me that the threat of ambivalence or general lack of awareness among the mass public is at least as threatening as competitors. And while Facebook is undoubtedly a formidable potential competitor for those guys, they also announced both read and write APIs and went as far as to have the Gowalla and FourSquare guys there for yesterday’s big announcement as partners. Having Facebook push out Facebook Places in a prominent way to its ½ billion users should go a long way to overcoming the general ignorance of what social location has to offer.
There has been a lot of talk in the press about Foursquare becoming THE location platform of the future, but I think you have to seriously re evaluate that idea with the launch of Facebook Places. Facebook is already well down the path of being the most powerful social platform, and they are obviously taking their entry into location very seriously, so it seems hard to believe that a social location gaming start up, even one with as much hype behind it as FourSquare has, will be able to elevate themselves to platform status in light of these events.
Since I, like a lot of people don’t yet have Facebook Places up and running, despite the announcement that it was available immediately yesterday, this is all speculation and hearsay based on hearing how its supposed to work. But I look forward to trying it out… it certainly seems like one of the closest things to a game changer that’s been announced in a while.
Comments
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http://www.locationawhere.com/21/08/2010/companies/facebook-places-36-hrs-later Facebook Places, Foursquare, check in, check-in, mobile social networks, location based services
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