Sep 30 2010

Facebook Places Hits Australia But Worth the Wait?

If you have a mobile device with a Facebook application installed then you may have noticed that the “Places” functionality has been enabled in Australia. This comes four weeks after the initial roll out in the USA and subsequent releases in Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom.

The concept of “checking in” is present and along similar lines to Foursquare but you don’t get any points (not that the points have any benefit apart from influencing the leader board which will be going soon anyway). You can also see where your friends are located (provided they share that information) and they can see where you have checked in (again, if you choose to share).

Largely, the differences between Foursquare and Facebook places comes down to a few aspects:

  1. Facebook Places allows you to check in not only yourself but a group of people at the same time whilst Foursquare can only check yourself in,
  2. Privacy settings are far more granular on Facebook Places than on Foursquare to the point where you can restrict an update to display just to one friend,
  3. Facebook Places has no concept of badges (amusing sorts of achievements) or “mayors” or people who have checked in at a particular location the most in a certain period of time.

Personally, these aspects do not provide sufficient incentive or differentiation to entice me to move away from Foursquare. I think Facebook wanted a slice of the location-based services action and has slapped this together to increase its informational gravity and launch a pre-emptive strike to prevent this information from being shared with other services (either present ones or future ones). Be it clever, tricky or nasty I can’t see myself buying into it.

At any rate, I like the Foursquare client on iPhone and Android and hooking it up to Facebook and Twitter is fairly straightforward. Foursquare is available globally and people can easily sign up for the service if they want it. Sure, it isn’t natively integrated with Facebook like Places but I am sure most people could work it out.

For me, Facebook Places is a bit of a fizzer and I won’t be using it.

Boydo

My name is Boyd and I’m a Service Management Specialist with a knack for operational data gathering, transformation, analysis and reporting.

In 2012, I obtained my Masters of Science in Information Technology through the University of New South Wales @ The Australia Defence Force Academy (UNSW@ADFA).

I was also part of an online community known as the Panasonic Insider Crew in the capacity of “Insider Guru” for Panasonic Australia where I interacted with other tech enthusiasts and find out more about Panasonic's latest gadgets.

I love technology, gadgets, and the Internet and maintain a keen interest in these areas locally, nationally, and globally. I hope by sharing my views on these topics that people will receive an honest point of view from someone with a genuine interest in these topics.

I have also written and edited articles for Neowin - you can check out my articles over @ https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/boyd_chan

I hope you enjoy reading my blog!

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