• Evidence That Facebook Places Is About To Launch

    Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

    Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). → Learn More

    Right now dozens of reporters are making their way down to Facebook’s Palo Alto offices for a special event that’s widely believed to be the launch of its long-rumored location feature. We’ve just come across evidence that this is, indeed, what the event will be focusing on, and it’s going to be called Facebook Places.

    Nestled in the source of Facebook’s homepage (which I enjoy browsing as a hobby) are two references to Places — namely, a section of the page that will be called pagelet_places_opt_in. My colleague MG Siegler conducted a similar search earlier this week and saw no evidence of the Places opt-in, so it looks like this is new.

    The code itself is obfuscated so it’s difficult to find where it points to (let us know if you figure it out in the comments), but this will almost certainly be one of Facebook’s alert messages that appears above the News Feed. Note that Facebook appears to be asking users to opt-in as opposed to forcing them to opt out, which is what spurred controversy with the instant personalization feature.

    Update: And here we go — Facebook Places in the flesh.

    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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