Facebook is empowered by “Places” – "Who. What. When. And now Where."

Few days ago, when manually updating apps on my Iphone, I found Facebook got a new feature called “Places”. So now, after buying FriendFeed, lauching a new real-time search engine, which declared a battle to Google in social search, Facebook has now expanded its power into location-based services (LBS). It is time to welcome a “Where” on Facebook, after the recent “When”. People who know search and LBS believe that there’s gold in real-time and social data, as well as geolocation and behavioral data. Then it seems Facebook is racing in a very fast pace to these latest trends and technologies, in order to consolidate its leading position in the world’s social network and technology map.

From now on, people can easily share their locations, tag friends who are with them at the location through “Places” from their mobile devices. At first, Facebook Places will be integrated with popular LBS poviders such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Booyah and Yelp by pushing the check-ins from these LBS providers’ apps to Facebook Places. Some providers are planning to launch location-based social games, which built on Facebook Places and based on interacting with people and sharing real-time posts at real-world locations; allowing users to socialize, meet new friends and track popularity. 

As Facebook has a large base of members of nearly half a billion, it is definitely a high proportion of their users will, intentionally or not, use the location sharing through “Places”. Although Facebook has just jumped on this location-based market, "Places" is now a threat to other LBS providers as it is taking the advantage thanks to Facebook current user base. It is predicted that “Places” won’t take long to become the mainstream.

In my opinion, the secret super power of "Places" didn’t lie in the concept or technique but in the local business location-based advertising market. Because as well as trying to attract users, Facebook is also trying to attract local businesses to build Facebook Place pages, and associate their Facebook presence with a location. It helps the Facebook advertising engine working more effectively by targeting audience using profile data, searching information and now, users’ geolocation. It opens opportunities on developing Facebook social games and apps using the location-based feature, but it also presents challenges in terms of privacy protection and requires Facebook to be careful in updating more rules to its current privacy setting.

All in all, it is seen that the social media giant has done many things to strengthen its power, expand its reach and certainly, to make more money. While waiting for the “Places” full functioning version coming to other market after testing in the US, this topic on location game is broadly opening for your personal opinion and discussion.

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