People who enjoy location based applications like Foursquare and Gowalla were in for a treat as Facebook rolled out its own location based tool, “Places.” Much like Foursquare, Gowalla, etc., Facebook’s new Places feature allows users to see where their friends are, what their comments on venues while also sharing their own locations and comments. Users can also post their location as a status update (please don’t do this very often…). Business owners will also have the ability to claim and edit their listings. For those of you worried about privacy, controls that determine who sees your Places updates have been set by default to friends only.
So how does it work?
Tagging:
In order to tag someone their settings must allow tagging.
- Select the Place and click “Tag Friends With You” link. Select the appropriate people from your friends list.
(You can choose to add a description of what you are doing at the place {Think Shout on Foursquare} - Click the “Check In” button.
Create a new Place:
- Select”Check In”
- Click “Add” to the left of the search box.
- Enter the new Place (you can also add a description).
- Click “Add”
Claim a Place:
- Search for the Place you would like to claim.
- Click the “Is this your business?”
- Follow the step-by-step verification process to claim your Place.
I just downloaded the update a few hours ago so I am sure I’ll have more thoughts on this after I’ve had time to play around with it. One feature that really stood out to me was the ability to tag your friends should they not have access through their phone. Knowing that location based application users in our area are big Foursquare users, it will be interesting to see how this effects that usage. With Facebook adding it’s own location-based application and having such a huge user base, you have to wonder, will people decide to kill their Foursquare / Gowalla accounts?
What are your thoughts? Have you played around on Places?
