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.

Well after giving it a bit more thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the industry needs a more broad “presence at place of sale” (PAPOS?) metric that could capture all the events where a person actually walks into a brick and mortar retailer and that action is recorded by any available means.

The PAPOS could then be looped back into the marketing ecosystem serving as the click or conversion rate for all advertising, both on and offline, targeted at driving brick and mortar foot traffic. When consumers actively check in somewhere that is fantastic, but I think it’s a bit unrealistic to expect this to become a ubiquitous consumer behavior, and it’s certainly not the only way to know when someone is in a retail store. Besides the 100% active way of checking in, there is of course the 100% passive way where your phone location is just recorded in carrier location logs, and many, many things in between like credit card and loyalty card swipes at retail and of course the wi fi and GPS positioning directly in the phone which enables all those great mobile discovery and navigation apps.

I suspect that the active and explicit way of registering PAPOS through check ins will be pretty limited and much will be inferred or recorded through other methods, you’d figure some company will just find a way to throw up 14 million geo fences around all of the retailers of America and fire back geo pixel trackers each time a mobile device enters a place of interest!

A more systematic way of recording PAPOS would go a long way in opening up the world of mobile and local digital advertising… which currently suffers from a serious disconnect when measuring ad effectiveness when they’re looking to drive offline foot traffic… tracking click to call is ok, but how often do you find yourself calling your local McDonalds? “Uh Excuse me, do you have chicken nuggets in stock today, I just want to be sure before I drove on over?”  HA!

NYC based Foursquare has undoubtedly been the leader in this area and their success seems to be attracting a lot of imitators.

Here are some thoughts on the importance of check ins and the ensuing pile on we’re about to see of folks adding on the feature.

Why Check Ins are interesting: 

•  for retailers, particularly places like restaurant, their regular customers are the bread and butter of their existence and they need to be well taken care of. For years stores have offered reward cards to reward their customers with their loyalty and repeat business. In one respect mobile check in’s are a modern twist on consumers registering their loyalty to a business… customers that 1. check in at a business often and 2. want to tell all their friends all about it, should be treated like gods by those retailers… not only are they reliable repeat customers, but they’re great marketers for the business as well.
• for the consumer and their social network what you say you do on your Facebook updates is one thing, but what you actually do and where you go is sometimes so much more telling and valuable. It adds another dimension to what people know about you, and what you want to tell the world about yourself. Since its driven from the mobile device, information is both timely and relevant to the immediate world around you, making it potentially more valuable than similar web services which are more like a history book than a telephone.
• having a bunch of strangers write out their opinion on various retail establishments is often valuable, but at the end of the day they’re very often nameless, faceless strangers… you may agree with them, or you may not… if enough nameless faceless strangers are all saying the same thing then the odds are that you may feel the same way as everyone else. But with the check ins and comments tied to your social network, you can take into account who is saying what and can factor in that knowledge.

What would make check ins VERY interesting.

• check-ins develop into the click rate for the geoweb. On the web, much of the advertising economy hinges on getting folks to click through and check out a web site, something advertisers are often willing to pay big bucks for. Within the geoweb, a check-in could be a similar proof of performance for mobile advertising, show them an ad for Sonny’s Restaurant on UrbanSpoon and they later check in at Sonny’s for the first time? That can be priced not too much different than a CPC deal.
• analysis of a pattern of check ins, in aggregate over time for predictive analysis and ad targeting. This is already pretty standard stuff on the web with behavioral targeting capabilities and if you like this you’ll also like this functionality. So it would only be natural to extend this to the mobile and geoweb.

Why in the future, check-in’s may not matter so much

• well theoretically you shouldn’t need to have someone press a button on their phone to tell you that they went somewhere. The technology already in place in the U.s. already knows your location without you having to do anything except walk around with your phone on. Folks like Sense Networks already get access to aggregated location data like this from wireless carriers and use it to allow businesses to make better marketing decisions, no check ins required. I do suspect that there could be a line drawn between the self reported locates and those aggregated and anonymous locations, with the former available for more widespread and individually targetable marketing uses.

It will be interesting to see how things progress between the self reported locates provided by check ins and the just plain looking up location and tying them back to a place.

Anyone can make the functionality to allow folks to check in somewhere, that’s not a big deal, what is a big deal is getting people to actually use it and use it a lot, and then how you make use of the information once you have it.

So when I heard about Yelp adding the functionality I checked it out buried in a drop down menu somewhere, my first thought was well that seems pretty useless, what’s the point of me checking in on Yelp, its a restaurant review site for me, and that’s it, no one except me will know I checked in or care.  There was nothing in it for me to check in.  Now if Facebook added the feature, that could be a different matter… it all depends on how they do it and what is in it for me if they do.