Observations: Facebook Places

Facebook just announced Places, a way for users to check into venues. It’s another geo-location service, just like: Google Places, Foursquare, Gowalla, and all the others. I held out of commenting to see the general reaction and because I don’t have an iPhone. So I haven’t actually used places. I didn’t really care about using it, I wanted to see if the casual Facebook user actually checked in.

: Image via CrunchBase

Just looking at my Facebook feed: People are using Places, they are checking in and they are enjoying the ease of having it in the Facebook app. This is something that I’ve had discussions with friends about, specifically when Facebook would jump into this space. Now that they have, foursquare, Gowalla, and all the other services are in big trouble. I almost never saw Foursquare check-ins, excluding the SM gurus etc.. Places are being used by casual users.

Now this might be because Facebook has made the service opt-out, which means a person has to go into their privacy settings and disable it. Otherwise they are automatically listed at venues they check in, their location is shared with their friends and their friends can check them in. This is something that most people don’t do and just don’t care enough about. Facebook knows this, and they now have a service that at the very worst will have way over 10 million users. This puts all the other services in the dust. It will be very interesting to see who is left standing in a year.

The location wars should be interesting to watch.

What do you think?