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.