There are a few people on the 8BIT Staff that think that Foursquare and Gowalla are lame.
Now I seriously have to disagree with my fellow 8BIT campers, seeing as how I am the mayor of almost every Starbucks in St. Louis (Mayor discount suckers). But guys like Tom have decided that foursquare is annoying and noisy, so he creates programs to filter out foursquare tweets in his twitter stream. Either way you slice it, geolocation continues to gain positive and negative feedback.
And now Facebook has entered the space, thanks to Mark Z. On Wednesday night at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Californa, a packed crowd gathered to hear the launch of Facebook Places.
What is Facebook Places? Well check out this video that gives you a quick run through of Facebook Places after the jump:
Read the live blog covering this event from Mashable here.
Thoughts? I’ve found it pretty interesting, especially since it seems that Facebook doesn’t seem to do much “original” these days.
It’s an interesting point of discussion to the merit that friends will be walking around the same area and be able to discover each other using Facebook Places. Apps like Loopt and even Gowalla boast discovering friends in close proximity as a great feature and yet have failed to really show this to be a viable reason to jump on the geo-tagging band wagon.
Is this a game changer?
Will business finally get on board with geolocation programs?
Would love to hear your thoughts?
Adam Lehman says
Don’t tell my mom, but there are places that I check in that I’d rather her not know about. I can still check in to foursquare and DECIDE to share via facebook.
Kyle Reed says
Hmmm, sounds like you could get grounded very soon 🙂
Sam says
heck yes it’s a game changer… with the ability to merge your location into your page you will now be able to increase the interactivity of your page. Most pages don’t get a lot of user interaction. No one comments on the local coffee shops page, but now with the ability to check in…
AND Every Sunday morning people can show up to church and check themselves in. That then populates the page and lets people know who was at church.
Like they said at the press conference, this is just a base to start from, the future possibilities are endless.
Kyle Reed says
I love that ability to interact at Church. Great point.
I do think you are right, game changer indeed.
Brian Barela says
ditto on the integration w pages. huge.
a place provides another quality result for people searching for a local ministry to find. i’m encouraging all my friends who lead Campus Crusade ministries to grab their place asap.
Graham Brenna says
I’m not so much into the randomly meeting a friend if I wasn’t planning on it. But I’m antisocial… so there’s that. 😉
I do think it’s cool that facebook would show you what you or your friends said about a location the last time they were there though. That is actually pretty neat.
PatrckB says
If I say I’m somewhere, I’m also, by implication, saying I’m NOT somewhere – like at home.
I don’t want to announce to the world that there’s no one at home now. Or that I’m out of town so I’m probably not going to be home for quite a while.
Call me old fashioned, but I won’t broadcast my whereabouts. It’s none of most people’s business.