• Facebook Places Goes Live On The iPhone. Check-In While It's Hot (If You Can)

    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

    At Facebook’s Places event earlier tonight, they noted that their iPhone app would be updated tonight with the new check-in functionality. Sure enough, here it is. Though the App Store update alert hasn’t kicked in yet, if you go to the actual page and redownload it, it should be the latest version (version 3.2).

    As you can see, the new Places area is front and center in the app. Clicking on it brings up a list of your friends who have recently checked in to various places. Clicking on those friends shows more details about the place they are at.

    Friend check-ins are sorted by those friends who are nearby and those who are elsewhere. Your stream will now show these Places check-ins as well.

    One thing that’s oddly tricky is actually checking-in yourself. I seriously cannot figure out how to do it right now. Lemme know what I’m missing. We were told it may be a while before the full funtionality rolls out to the app, so perhaps Facebook is holding some small element back for the time being. [Update below from Facebook]

    Still, on the touch.facebook.com version of the site the functionality is working and seems much more obvious.

    You’ll also notice that Facebook has changed the Inbox icon on their new app. And to make room for Places, the Notes element of the app has been moved on to the second page.

    Again, you can find the latest version of the app here — sadly, it’s only available for U.S. users for the time being.

    Update: A number of people in the U.S. are also reporting seeing messages that Places isn’t available in their area yet. It appears that Facebook is slowly rolling this out. Stay tuned.

    Update 2: I’ve just spoken with Facebook and they informed me that even though the app is live, the Places functionality isn’t rolled out to everyone just yet. That’s why some people see the message that it’s not available in their area — and why others can’t yet check-in. Facebook wants to make sure their servers can handle the load that is inevitably coming so it will be a roll out over the next day or two I’m told.

    Update 3: And now version 3.2.1 is out with bug fixes. Check it out. This one should work as intended.

    Here are some quick pictures of what the new app looks like:

    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...

    Learn more
    Product: iPhone
    Website: apple.com
    Company Apple

    Apple’s iPhone was introduced at MacWorld in January 2007 and officially went on sale June 29, 2007, selling 146,000 units within the first weekend of launch. The phone has been hailed as revolutionary with its bundle of advanced mobile web browsing, music and video playback, and touch screen controls. The iPhone is exclusively carried on the networks of both AT&T and Verizon in the U.S. An iPhone can function as a video camera (video recording was not a standard feature...

    Learn more

    Sponsored Ads

    blog comments powered by Disqus

    Sponsored Ads

    Sponsored Ads

    Upcoming Events

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA