
Facebook Just Bowed Out of the Check In War With Foursquare - taylorbuley
http://www.betabeat.com/2011/08/23/facebook-just-bowed-out-of-the-check-in-war-with-foursquare/
======
aloneinkyoto
Facebook Places is the feature I've been using the most on Facebook since it
was introduced. And I can probably say the same thing about the rest of my
circle of friends. It is very sad if they are intentionally going to limit
such an awesome and well designed feature (way, way better than anything
Foursquare, Gowalla or Twitter offers). Especially if they are going to
require you to attach a status message or photo to every check in. Most check
ins I do is simply to passively tell my friends where I am to coordinate
social gatherings in an informal way without having to attach any greater
meaning or social significance to the fact. I'm sharing my location. I might
not necessarily be interested in sharing anything more than that.

It's a bit like saying: "Oh, by the way. I might be hanging out down at the
bar tonight. Swing by if you feel like it". Without actually having to say it
out loud.

edit: The more I think about this, the more angry I get. It feels like the
Google+ nerd mafia is slowly destroying Facebook through bad influence. They
simply don't understand how and why Facebook works and is popular. The whole
privacy and circles stuff for example, which is just stupid. No normal person
cares about that. Facebook is a tool for sharing and connecting and to limit
that in the name of privacy is insanely counterproductive. It only adds a wet
blanket of politics on something that is better understood through social
psychology and sociology. Facebook used to understand that, but now it seems
they've started to become distracted. Sad really.

~~~
tejaswiy
Wow, really? Google+ is an incredibly well designed tool, done by people
actually working in psychology, sociology etc. rather than Facebook's geek
centric culture of push updates now, worry about consequences later. If
anything, what Facebook has been doing was to progressively push people trade
off privacy for convinience and while they whine and complain about it for a
while, they get used to it.

I'm not saying plus will win the social wars because Facebook has a lot of
people because it built up a lot of momentum. But if it looses it won't be
because people found it too nerdy / geeky or whatever. It just means Facebook
had a huge advantage and they didn't let it slip.

~~~
aloneinkyoto
The macro difference in philosophy between Facebook and Google+ is that
Google+ encourages social silos and obscurity (typical characteristics of
geek/hacker culture, inherited from American liberalism and Californian
utopism), while Facebook on the other hand encourages emphasis on context and
sharing (in the two way interactive sense, not the one way broadcasting sense
that for example Twitter promotes).

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endlessvoid94
Posting a status update with a location tag is the _same thing_ as checking in
at that location. You can tag people in your status updates, and coupled with
a location, you can still tag people in with you.

The functionality that foursquare (and apps utilizing foursquare's API) offer
are still possible, perhaps even easier.

Facebook is still going to win this part of the "war".

~~~
mrmaddog
Exactly. Facebook is not exiting the location game, but rather opening it up
to a much broader audience.

I presume Facebook found that the people who used check-ins was a subset of
the people that used tagging functionality, so they scrapped the check-in
model and focused on making location accessible in a format that a) more
people are comfortable with and b) is consistent with the rest of the Facebook
experience.

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taylorbuley
Not quite sure Foursquare is in a better position now that Facebook is bowing
out. Is it possible this means there's no market to be had?

~~~
damoncali
I've always thought the math on this was sketchy. Where are there enough users
concentrated to make checkins commercially useful? I just can't see it, but I
reserve the right to be totally, completely, wrong.

~~~
jstrate
How about a conference? Music festival? I was at Outside Lands in GG park a
few weekends ago and (given the price of a 3-day pass was $200) there were
plenty of location aware smartphones used by ~60k people.

~~~
damoncali
Yeah, I suppose, but how do you get from that to the multi-hundred million
dollar exits demanded by the investors on these deals? Compare those 60k on
one day to the multiple millions _every day_ that read local newspapers sites.
How do you make something more and more and more local without reducing the
number of people who care about it to near zero?

For example, at a conference like SXSW, you have x-thousand attendees with
their smart phones. You can track where they all go for the whole event. But
the number of people who would find that data useful (by my way of thinking at
least) is quite small - the local vendors, the other attendees (who won't pay
a dime for the service), who else?

How do you sell it to them and how much can you get? How do you monetize that
in a way that isn't just glorified banner ads to a small market segment? How
do you make it HUGE? That's where I have trouble.

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bproper
According to Jay Yarow, Facebook is quietly phasing out Places. Instead any
status update can be tagged with location.

<http://www.businessinsider.com/foursquare-facebook-2011-8>

MG Siegler Confirms - <http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/facebook-location-
tagging/>

~~~
brg
"Phasing out" sounds like the incorrect term. If places are part of status
updates it sounds like "making integral in the product."

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EponymousCoward
Bowed out of the checkin-war? How about just WON the check-in war by making it
an integral feature and de-productizing it out from under 4square et al's
feet?

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dkrich
I don't think this signals a victory for Foursquare. Do they even make any
money? I don't use the service myself, but my only interaction with it is
rampant annoying updates from people I barely even know on Facebook. I never
thought the "check-in" was a terribly useful feature anyway, but more of a
cool new display of the power of geolocation.

I always thought it would be far more useful to build these services out as a
way to allow people to quickly find each other in one-to-one, as opposed to
unsolicited one-to-many, updates. For example, I think a more common use case
would be to pull out a phone and alongside a contact have a single button to
query for location, then on the other end have the user just as easily
transmit his or her location. That would fix the privacy concerns as well.

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Yhippa
I actually found Facebook's check in functionality to generate more discussion
among friends than Foursquare. The big problem from me is that I wish they
could have come up with a better way to restrict who I'm showing where I'm at
similar to Google+ circles.

~~~
nbm
With the new location changes described at
<https://www.facebook.com/about/location> (which will start rolling out soon),
you can attach a location to any status update, and this means you can use the
status update privacy controls to control who see where you are - for example,
using a friend list to only share with a subset of your friends.

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kin
Did they publicly announce that they are getting rid of Facebook places? My
circle of friends are still checking-in everywhere via Facebook. On a side
note I use Facebook check-ins over Foursquare because of the tagging feature.

~~~
FireBeyond
Read the comments on the article for a far better analysis / explanation than
the article itself.

In fact, checking in will still be around, and location info will be able to
be attached to -any- content on FB.

~~~
bproper
When they launched places, the explicitly copied Foursquare and the check-in
model. Zuckerberg named dropped Foursquare at the unveiling of Places.

They are now getting rid of Places. From the Foursquare blog post:

"As a part of this, we are phasing out the mobile-only Places feature.
Settings associated with it are also being phased out or removed. (You can
read more about how location works and settings affected here:
<http://www.facebook.com/about/location)>

Yes, location will still be part of Facebook, as noted by Betabeat. But it
will not be executed with the "check-in" model foursquare pioneered. The new
way will be closer to tagging a user in a Google+ conversation.

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geofflewis
The analysis in this article is just plain wrong, starting with the headline.

Incorporating location-tagging directly into the status update UI (and
extending the ability to tag a location to photos and videos), does not mean
Facebook is bowing out of any "war"... It means they are honing in on the
right location feature set for their userbase, rather than simply copying
Foursquare.

I predict location-tagging of status updates and content will gain massive
adoption within Facebook and quickly dwarf Facebook Check-In, which by the
way, is staying part of Facebook's mobile apps (at least for now).

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kessler
Curious to see where they move check-in and location integrations. I've
noticed they've been using my foursquare data to show me "Which place do you
like better?" in the sidebar. They could do a lot more recommending of places
like restaurants, bars, stores, and tie in deals.

~~~
nbm
As described in <https://www.facebook.com/about/location>, you will soon be
able to "check-in" by attaching a location/venue and tagging the people you
are with to any status update, whether it is text or a photo or a video - and
you can now do it from your computer, rather than just from your smart phone.

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robryan
Weird, within my social group foursquare has hardly been used but Facebook
places is regularly. I use it but have no intention to maintain a separate
social profile just for it.

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baguasquirrel
I wonder how much of this is due to Facebook deciding that location check-ins
aren't that big a deal. Most of my friends still don't "get" what is the big
deal with this.

~~~
de90
Because quite frankly they aren't a big deal right now. Yes, of course it has
a huge potential benefit, but it's not there. So why should they care about
it.

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bialecki
Wait, without the checkin, what happens to Facebook Deals? This doesn't make a
lot of sense, they must be removing it to relaunch it.

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abava
just for shame-less plug: we provided badges functionality via mashup with FB
API: <http://qrpon.linkstore.ru>

