Updated: After many months of work, Facebook announced its “Places” functionality at a press conference this evening. The feature will begin to roll out immediately with a new iPhone app and Touch.Facebook.com for advanced mobile browsers.
At the core of the new product, users can check into locations represented by new “place pages” on Facebook. Similar to Foursquare, you can create places that don’t already exist. Businesses can claim place pages, as well.
One of the interesting features is the ability to tag friends who are with you. “Tagging is one of the reasons that makes this really special,” Michael Sharon, Facebook Product Manager for Places, who explained it’s similar to tagging a photo on Facebook. When you arrive at a place and check in, you can tag friends who are with you. A message shows up on your wall, your tagged friends’ wall and on the place page itself. On the privacy front, you can delete any check-in you’d like, and adjust your settings so nobody can tag you at a place.
By saving check-ins with status updates on Place Pages, Facebook will create a “collective memory of place,” said VP of Product Chris Cox, explaining that “stories are pinned to a physical location and shared with us and the people around us for years to come.” Cox explained a scenario of kids visiting a place 20 years from now, their device vibrates, alerting them that their parents experienced their first kiss there.
“Places” will also be accessible via the API — “read” only for now, and the “write/search” API is in beta. Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla were on stage as beta partners. “I think it’s a great thing for the entire industry,” said Holger Luedorf, Foursquare’s VP of Mobile & Partnerships. “Check-in is really at the core of all this, and what we all build upon this, is really the most critical.” Luedork also hinted at new Foursquare features that will push content to users who visit relevant places, perhaps an expansion of Foursquare Tips (which would be of interest to local media organizations, I’m sure.)
On the monetization front, Facebook said “Places” will launch without any proximity ad components. “Certainly you can imagine these things in the future,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “We think this is a really good starting point.”
Facebook’s entry into the geolocation space will democratize location to a massive user base. Until now, “checking in” has been a very niche activity. I would imagine in a very short period of time, Facebook will generate more location-based status updates than Twitter (although it will be interesting to see how many users limit these updates to their friends.) And when Facebook gets around to incorporating proximity advertising into its already powerful ad targeting capability, it will help usher in a new era of local advertising.
(Full disclosure: I occasionally work with Facebook in my job at msnbc.com.)
