Twitter is rolling out “Twitter Places” powered in part by a deal with Localeze, and now TechCrunch is reporting Facebook has inked its own Localeze deal. “Essentially, what we’re hearing is that Facebook will use this data to populate some new kind of fan pages for places, that businesses will be able to then claim on the network,” TechCrunch reports. And you could imagine some kind of check-in-like feature, similar to Twitter, that allows users to tag status updates with a place.
Neighborhood blogs should watch this carefully, because unlike Twitter, Facebook has the ability to convene its own neighborhood communities as an online destination. It’s unclear how Facebook will pull all this together — for example, is a neighborhood a place? If so, and if Facebook encourages users to associate themselves with a neighborhood, you can imagine how that could compete with A) existing Facebook pages set up by neighborhood blogs and B) forums hosted by neighborhood blogs themselves.
