The countdown is officially on for the big Facebook location backlash. How long will it be? One week? Two weeks? We all know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And that’s too bad because I think Places is actually pretty great — potentially.
The ACLU wasted little time yesterday trying to start such a backlash (their post on the matter came what, a whole 30 seconds after the press conference ended?). Evelyn already did a nice job deconstructing many of their arguments and showing why a few were ridiculous. All I can add is to say that thank god the ACLU doesn’t design consumer apps — it would be like Facebook’s current nightmare of settings multiplied by a billion. We’d have settings for individual minutes in individual days for when individual users could see individual profiles. It would be the least social social network ever. → Read More
Leading up to Facebook’s location announcement, there were two schools of thought. Either you thought Facebook Places was going to destroy Foursquare. Or you thought that this new service would help the startup by bringing more awareness to the location field. It appears that the latter is happening.
“Just heard from The @HarryH that today was @foursquare’s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley just tweeted out a few minutes ago (@HarryH is the Twitter name of Harry Heymann, Foursquare’s engineering lead). → Read More
Yesterday during their Places event, Facebook showed a video highlighting the thoughts of the team of developers who actually built the functionality. It’s slick as hell — very nicely done. In fact, we weren’t the only ones who initially thought that it looked like an Apple video.
No it’s not quite the FaceTime Don Draper-esque commercial, but it’s much better than a lot of the very bland videos that most other companies put out there to talk about their products. → Read 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. → Read More
Perhaps you’ve heard: Facebook just released their new location feature called Places. If not, we have about a dozen posts about it that we recommend. But the obvious next question is what this means for those already in the space — and specifically the current buzz leader, Foursquare. Sure, they’re partnering with Facebook on the API launch, but are they in trouble? They don’t seem too worried about it. Instead, it’s expansion time.
Foursquare is on the verge of opening their first office outside of their New York City headquarters, we’ve confirmed with the company. Shortly, they will open an office in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Both new Foursquare VP of Mobile, Holger Luedorf (who was on-hand at the event tonight), and VP of Business Development, Tristan Walker, will be based out of that office, we’re told. And they hope to hire a couple more people to work there soon too. → Read 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. → Read More
As we heard tonight, Facebook has officially launched Places, the social network’s location-based platform. We know what Places will mean for Facebook users. Users will be able to check-in to Places (created by both people and businesses) via the web or through mobile apps. And the feature has an API so partners like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah can allow their users to check-in to Facebook’s places. But what does this mean for businesses? Interestingly, Facebook seems to actively be targeting advertisers on the network. It is already distributing a how-to guide for registering a Place page for their businesses, the benefits and more. You can find the guide here and we’ve embedded the document below.
Facebook is wasting no time encouraging advertisers to start registering their businesses. The social network may be starting from behind, but it wants to ramp up its directory quickly and is encouraging advertisers to create their own Places Here’s how Facebook markets Places to advertisers in its how-to guide: → Read More
Today at an event at their headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, Facebook unveiled their new Places product — their location/check-in solution. Obviously, their entry in this space has been rumored for a long time — a very long time. But during the Q&A session, someone asked how long Facebook has actually been working on this Places product. Since December, one of the engineers in charge of the product replied.
But he also revealed that there have been other “skunkworks” projects internally at Facebook surrounding location long before that. The past 8 months have just been specifically focused on what is now called Places. CEO Mark Zuckerberg stepped in to say that Facebook was focused on the question of “what is a good set of features and a good product?” He noted that they wanted to make sure they were building something different than what everyone else already had built. → Read More
We’re sitting here in the waiting room at Facebook waiting for the supposed location event to start. Facebook won’t say officially what the event is about, but it seems like everyone knows. And now we know for sure. Earlier, we found code evidence of the new Facebook Places area. Now we’ve found the feature itself. Welcome to Facebook Places.
The following screenshots are from the touch version of Facebook’s website. The same place we originally found the location code months ago. As you can see, there’s a new Places tab. When clicked on, it shows friends who have geotagged themselves at various locations (both of the people in the shots below are Facebook employees — no surprise there). When you tap “Share where you are with friends” from here, it brings up a list of nearby places. Yes, it’s Facebook check-in. → Read 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. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
