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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces Facebook Places

Last week Facebook debuted their latest product, a geolocation feature called Facebook Places. In the months leading up to the formal announcement, there was a lot of talk that Facebook was developing it, just no-one from the company would say so in any official capacity.

At the moment it is only available to Facebook users who have the iPhone application. Users had to download the latest update in order to get the new Places feature, which now appears directly in the middle of the menu screen on the application.

I had the opportunity to begin using the new feature on Thursday last week, while out with friends. We visited a few different locations, so I was able to try a few things out.

Facebook Places works two ways: You can check yourself into a location, or your friends can check you in. The latter is causing some uproar, because of the privacy implications. When someone checks in on Facebook Places, they are given the option to “tag” whomever else is with them. The problem is that discretion is entirely up to the friend, who can check you into a location without you even *being* there.

Early on, I ran into this problem. I was at a pizza place with one friend, waiting for another. I went to “check-in” on Facebook Places and tagged her as being there with me. I didn’t think much of it, but in fact she hadn’t arrived yet. She saw the tag and then untagged herself. She did not like other people checking her into places, which then shows up in her personal timeline on Facebook.

Count this as a “lesson learned the hard way” for Facebook after past privacy slip-ups. When they launched Facebook Places, they included an opt-out for letting other people tag you. It’s somewhat buried in the privacy settings, but it is there. Over at ValleyWag they’ve published a “how-to” for ensuring that friends don’t check you in places.

Once it launched, talk soon turned to whether Places would kill other geolocation services like Foursquare, Gowalla and loopt. My opinion is that it will not. Places is an interesting service, and I’m sure it will create greater interest in geolocation as a whole, but it’s a one-trick-pony as geolocation applications go. Plus on the day that Places launched, Foursquare recorded record one-day new user sign-ups.

It seems that the one-dimensional nature of Facebook Places was intended. Here’s an interesting quote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg about that very thing:

When asked about checking-in to watching television shows or the like, Zuckerberg joked, “there’s a lot of stuff we’re not doing.”

Like with Foursquare, businesses can claim their spot on Facebook Places. However, unlike Foursquare, businesses using Facebook Places aren’t shown any meaningful analytics. You are shown how many people have “checked in”, but you aren’t able to see who they are. This could be an instance of Facebook being gun-shy when it comes to potential privacy flare-ups; however in this case it’s something that is needed.

Since Places is only available to Facebook users who access the site via iPhone, it is difficult to determine the overall success rate with any accuracy. Only a fraction of my friends are using it — most of whom are already Foursquare users — so the case for “mass acceptance” is not there right now. And since Facebook hasn’t released any usage statistics yet, we’re all left to guess.

Places could go on to be a major player in geolocation. But before that happens, they will need to build the service out and add more features and functionality.

In sum: Reports of Foursquare’s death at the hands of Facebook Places are greatly exaggerated.