

Facebook launching Facebook Places (check-ins) - tlrobinson
http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive

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dotBen
Rod Begbie asked a great question at the top of the Q&A... "How do I take down
the address of my home if it gets listed and becomes popular such that FB
makes it public?" (FB said that popular locations become public if enough
people check in, so imagine you are having a party at your house...).

The answer is you can't, and Facebook clearly hadn't thought of that in their
user stories and use cases. The group on stage didn't seem to feel it was an
issue either.

For all of Chris Cox's pretentious guff ( _dude, give me a break_ ) about
their interest in sociology and FB respecting the "3rd place" concept, I think
it shows how out of touch with "IRL" issues FB product development is. I feel
they see everything as a 'data problem to solve' not the people + human
behaviors that are really going on.

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nl
Imagine how bad it would be if someone's "Having coffee at work"
tweet/facebook message was public!! Then people could look up their name in
the phone book and rob them!

Oh wait.. even worse! Imagine if everyone worked basically the same hours -
then people could predict when your house is likely to be empty and rob them!!

Oh wait.. we already have that. Better panic already I guess.

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callmeed
First, we don't have it on the scale of Facebook yet.

Second, everyone knows their Twitter/FourSquare posts are going to be public.
Not so with FB.

Third, Facebook is the one with the established reputation of making public by
default user information that many assume to be private.

I think the point is less about telling people that you're away and more about
publicly broadcasting the location of _other people's_ private information.

I can assure you I'm not a privacy nut, but I think we all have the right to
keep the latitude and longitude of our homes hidden from 500 million other
people if we want.

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jasonlbaptiste
Some facts to think about:

a) Marc Andreessen is on the board of Facebook. b) Facebook started working on
this 8 months ago. c) Foursquare had turned down acquisition offers from FB d)
Andreessen and Horowitz invested in Foursquare ~ 2 months ago.

Not saying that Andreessen wouldn't want to have a hedge going on, but if
there were complete certainty that FB places would crush 4sq in his mind, they
wouldn't have invested.

~~~
pedalpete
True. FourSquare is also still in a position where they can pivot.

The facebook status updates didn't kill twitter, but I think twitter became
more of marketing tool than a tool to communicate with friends. Maybe that's
just me, but I think competing with FB forces a company to focus on where they
can compete.

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danielrhodes
Surprised that Foursquare and Gowalla actually took part in this.

The underlying data they have on location and check-ins is basically being
given to Facebook. That means that the only real value left in those apps is
what they have to offer on top of that, which is not super defensible, whereas
Facebook gets to be the underlying platform where there is real value.

~~~
rbranson
Sounds like they're doing this to avoid being totally overthrown by the
incumbent. They're picking the better of 2 bad situations.

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rokhayakebe
I upvoted you, but was your mom on Facebook 3, 4, 5 years ago when it wasn't
what it is today?

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novum
You will apparently be able to opt out of being tagged in someone else's
checkin, and the default privacy of a checkin is friends only. I have been
critical of facebook's privacy policy, but this is promising.

...until they change the default, as they did with name, photo, friends, work
history, education history, likes, interests, activities, and others to
globally public with no privacy setting.

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brown9-2
Does anyone else find this live coverage ("Live from Facebook HQ!") with
interviews on-site with the developers a little ... weird?

Does any other site out there offer live coverage of their own feature
announcements?

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danielrhodes
Wolfram Alpha did. Apparently nobody told them they were launching a website,
not a spaceship.

~~~
nkassis
But they would argue that the impact on humanity is greater than sending men
in space for science. ;-p

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savrajsingh
When will it just run in the background, so it'll tell me when I happen to be
within 400 yards of a friend in NYC? Now that would be cool.

~~~
carbocation
I upvoted you because I agree and disagree. I agree because it would be
totally cool if we both wanted that. It would be totally annoying if one of us
actually wished to be private at that moment, or was in a rush, etc, and just
forgot to turn off facebook.

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DanielN
I totally see why this is a fear. But actually I don't see a feature like this
causing these kind of problems. How is it any different than receiving a text
when you are busy or running into someone you know when you don't have time to
chat. Everyone has times when they are busy and everyone has times when they
aren't busy and want to be social.

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carbocation
I guess it's just like bumping into someone that you know when you don't have
time to chat - but with a 50-fold increase in the radius of my personal
sphere. I'd definitely give it a shot, at least, to see if I liked it.

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Tichy
Is it possible that check-ins are just a fad? Can you imagine doing check-ins
for the next 10 years, or for the next 30 years?

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riffraff
I think in their current form (game-ish) they are.

But attaching useful information to real life, that's not, it's just one of
the sides of a future internet of things, and I believe that is where we are
headed.

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Tichy
Sure - I think Twitter annotations might see some innovative uses in the
future. Just not sure if we need an extra app+hype for every category of
likeable things.

In fact, why not give everything a URL and be done with it (then the like
button would suffice). Maybe that is what is really happening and 4sq et al
are just domain grabbing schemes.

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ebun
Kudos to them. This feature was just a matter of time.

In addition to the growing popularity of 4square-like services, exchanging
contact info w/new people at events & places has become less "What's your
number?" to "Are you on Facebook?". This feature will make that sort of
interaction much easier.

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fnazeeri
Bye bye FourSquare...

~~~
robg
What's the history for Facebook squashing competition?

~~~
nl
MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5, Bebo. I'm sure there are others that I'm
missing.

They have played pretty hard in the virtual currency area too (although if
anyone really thought they'd be able to build a business in that area on
Facebook then I've got a bridge to sell you)

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jdminhbg
I'm not so sure they're going to crush 4Square or Gowalla. Facebook is for
wasting time -- idle messaging, playing Farmville. Mobile checkin apps are
sort of the opposite of that. I don't doubt that 4Square users will connect to
FB and start publishing their data (and if they decide to do that instead of
polluting Twitter with it, awesome), but who is the target audience for
pulling out the FB app on iPhone/Android and checking in somewhere?

~~~
pxlpshr
I disagree. I see a ton of status updates from mobile devices by non-tech
friends, and hardly any of those friends use 4s or Gowalla.

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moondowner
Great, now except quizzes and quotes and YouTube videos posted on my "News
Feed", I'll have check-ins too!

Okay, maybe that was little ironic. Glad to see Facebook advancing on other
fields too, and as for those check-ins on my feed, I'll click hide on those
people who check-in every 15 minutes :)

And glad to see that they aren't kicking out the competition, but partnering
with them!

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GBKS
Geo has so much potential and it looks like Facebook is working super hard to
integrate this in a useful way. Checking in just to say "I'm at X" is just not
interesting. Making location a part of a story (party, vacation, location
where picture was taken...) is much more interesting and I can see it work out
great if they find out how to tackle that. Their approach is very good, IMHO.

That being said, it seems like Facebook is building a record of me without me
knowing, that I have no insight in. Friends tag me in pictures and tag my
location now, too. That information is shown to various circles of friends.
Now I'm not sure who knows what about me know since I neither created the
information, nor had any part in sharing it. I suppose this reflects the real
world in some way (people can talk about you whenever they want), it's just
amplified in a major way.

Very interesting and intriguing indeed.

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motters
I'm beginning to think that this is what Lanier's "digital maoists" are all
about.

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iamdave
I'm still wondering how all of this location based talk even arose between
Gowalla and FourSquare...I feel bad for BrightKite, which was around at least
a year before these two.

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rradu
Doesn't show up for me. Not on touch site and not on the iphone app either.
Anyone else having this issue?

I'm thinking it's because until recently I had my account set to a different
language (I've been late to receive updates because of this before), but I am
acatually in the US.

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nano81
Not at 100% of US immediately

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rradu
Doesn't say that anywhere--just says "Places is only available in the United
States right now"

EDIT: TC has updates from fb on it:
<http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/18/facebook-places-iphone-2/>

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jarin
It's not showing up in the "Updates" section of the App Store yet, but if you
go to the Facebook page in the App Store you can install the update. The
Places feature seems to be "unavailable" for a lot of people right now though
as they roll it out on the backend.

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jarin
It would be nice if the write API was available, but at least we'll be able to
get the read-only stuff into Locurious before the next update goes out :)

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desigooner
Here's the blogpost from fcbk:

<http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/403>

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BRadmin
No mention of Loopt?

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duffbeer703
Great, another way for creepy Facebook to know more about me!

I think Facebook has jumped the shark. I have a couple of hundred contacts on
FB, and the activity levels are way low compared to what they used to be.

