Facebook Places Vs. Foursquare and Gowalla – A Short Review
Facebook has launched their new “Places” service. At face value, this appears to be an affront to all the other location based services that were already providing this type of service. Does the mobile community need another ? Read on for some of the updates to this ongoing scenario.
Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and others have been involved in giving people the opportunity to go places during the day and get rewarded for it. Foursquare is smack dab into an upgrade that would improve their services to their already fast-growing crowd of users. Foursquare is also doing the obvious good for a dying economy. They allow business owners to get yet another route of publicity for themselves. Then along comes the bigger Facebook to the table.
Facebook has over 500 million users. They started their location based service last Wednesday. It was not without a prior meeting of other such services like Foursquare and Gowalla. The owners of Foursquare and Gowalla seemed to like the newfound attention. Other voices on the web saw it as the beginning of the end for Facebook´s newly acquired “adversaries” Some were seeing “fours” and “squares” in the icon that Facebook used to locate people on the map. It was a long shot to make out the four or the squares, but nevertheless, conspiracy theories are popular on the web.
What really made Facebook users stand up was the feature of allowing your friends to check in other friends. For example, even if a person was not at a movie or restaurant, one of their friends could check them in at that movie or restaurant using Facebook Places. Needless to say, this has not gone over well in the mobile world. Location based services are supposed to have some level of credibility. Saying someone is at a specific location when they are definitely somewhere else is a brazen lie. If you are a happily married man and your friend tries to check you in to the latest strip club, it could definitely cause problems if your wife thinks you are at work.
Even with the ability to log people into places when they are not there, the Facebook Places service seems to have taken off. Some powerful groups took notice. The ACLU has reportedly made a point on the features of Facebook Places. Those who get checked in to places by their friends get a message either allowing the check in to proceed or to say “not now” if they do not want to allow the check in. There is not a chance to say “never”. Not only that, anyone at a certain place that is not on the friend´s list can see a Facebook user if they also are at the same location. The friend´s list is therefore not just a “friends” list.
The direct loss of control over a Facebook users personal information is, again, in the spotlight. For now this new service is still going through the growing pains of being on untested ground. Technology is giving people new ways to connect and some feel it is being crammed down their throat. They like being on a popular network with their friends but have little control over what happens after that. This seems to be a trend among social networks, and continued with Facebook.
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