Facebook introduced a service called Places last week in response to similar marketplace efforts like Foursquare and others. In a nutshell it allows you to share where you are and connect with friends nearby. The advantage to Places is the gigantic reach that Facebook has with a membership of over 500 million and its position as the social network of choice. That makes Places truly useful and a way to connect with your already established network (rather than creating a new one.) It also appears that Facebook is willing to partner somewhat with location based services on Yelp and others, rather than to wipe them out. Places currently works only on the Facebook iPhone app and with other phones which support W3 geolocation.
However, Facebook still hasn’t learned from its privacy stumbles. The privacy default for Places allows you to check in your friends and tag them to a location without their permission. This can create alarm even in those digerati who are used to broadcasting their locations, as shown by a user’s experience in the New York Times this last weekend. Who wants to excuse themselves from a dinner date only to be ‘outed’ at a party down the block by Places? So, I recommend going in to your privacy settings in Facebook and disabling ‘allow others to check me in.’
This privacy issue is similar to others where Facebook has defaulted user updates to ‘public’ and has taken heat. They either won’t learn and/or truly see this as the way social networking is evolving. In spite of this I believe Places will soon be a leading geolocation service – purely due to Facebook’s size.
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