• Facebook's Awesome Dark Knight-Esque Live Check-In Display

    Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

    MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

    If you hate the idea of Facebook gaining a location element, you’re really going to hate this. It’s awesome.

    Tonight, immediately after their Places launch event, the company flipped the switch (an actual switch, by the way) to make the location product live. While it was a few hours before the new location-enabled iPhone app went live, touch.facebook.com went live for millions of users around the U.S. right away. And Facebook had some giant projections to showcase that.

    As you can see in the video below and image above, all across the U.S. people immediately began checking-in when Facebook turned the feature on. Oh look, there’s Vikas at San Francisco Fine Arts. Oh, there’s Alex at Jenkins Canyon. Etc. Those glowing dots are people checking in. And big clusters of glowing dots mean a lot of people are checking-in in those areas (New York, San Francisco, LA, and a few other obvious ones).

    Obviously, Facebook was just showing people’s first names to placate those worried about the privacy ramifications of such a wall. It’s a little like that wall of sonar monitors from The Dark Knight — which is to say, awesome.

    It’s also a bit like Apple’s App Wall:

    More about Facebook Places:

    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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