Facebook yesterday launched their latest much talked about competitor to location based app, to compete with the market leaders Foursquare.
Places at present is only available on the iPhone via the Facebook app, and from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and your based in the USA, support for the rest of the world be be rolled out over the coming weeks / months. At present it is pretty basic so it seems they have rushed a stable release, and one would assume they will roll out more features as they move forward.
Places as it stands now has the following features:
- Places is integrated into your Facebook profile
- Check in and your update will appear on the Place page, your friends’ News Feeds and your Wall (depending on privacy settings).
- Uses Google maps for locations
- Lets you see where your friends most recent “check ins” are (depending on privacy setting chosen by the user.
- Allows you to leave time stamped tips / comments about venues
- Will let you check in with friends from one phone (i.e. negating you all to have to check in individually)
- Allows you to find nearby places
- Check ins are only shared with your friends unless you select it to be made public
- Your location is worked out either via GPS or cell phone triangulation
- Places will provide you with a time stamped history of all the Places you have gone to.
As a basic app at present its lacking compared to the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. It does not link to twitter yet, and there are no tools businesses can use for their locations to see traffic or reward / incentivise people checking in. There are also no badges to unlock for regular users, this may seems like a small thing but it makes foursquare almost like a game in some aspect and incentives users to use the app more often.
At the Places launch conference yesterday in Paulo Alto, California, representatives from Foursquare and other existing competitors announced ways in which they’d be leveraging the Places API to allows their users to check in and publish their data through their Facebook feed and transfer their badges and pins.
Overall though its early days for Facebook’s Places, more features will be rolled out over the coming months, also integrating their brilliant Facebook ads feature will no doubt allow marketers to target people even more precisely than ever before, as well as earn Facebook some more tidy revenue.
Facebook now has well over 500 million users and continues to grow, providing a huge existing potential customer base. This is one Facebook app I would recommend to follow closely.
To read more on Places from Facebook themselves click here or go to the places web page here
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