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.
You can still get the exact same check-in behaviour with the new system - just don't put a status message or photo, and give your location. It looks identical to how a check-in looks now.
You can also now do this from your computer (not just your smartphone), and do it just before you go to, or just after you return from your venue, not just while you're there.
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.
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).
Except for the massive issues surrounding name use and the triviality in which it can be used to grief other people and not just on Google+ but their entire google account.
I like the circles concept. It is not about privacy, it is that my family wants to see endless photos of my child while my friends don't. IMO is more about courtesy than privacy/politics.
But that is exactly what is counterproductive about it. Because it forces you to make assumptions about the people you interact with. Have you asked all of your friends wether or not they might find your family photos interesting or not? Do you think there is no value in being exposed to things that is beyond your comfort zone? I might be a 25 year old party animal that doesn't care shit about family life. But seeing the odd family photo or two in my feed now and then might perhaps be good for me? And I might even enjoy it, even if I don't want to readily admit it to my self. There is also the dimension of making the social realm more "democratic". In the sense that it is a good thing if people are not intentionally excluded from social contexts. It helps create a more tolerant society and more robust and flexible social networks if the interaction in the networks are less clustered (something a hacker, with knowledge about how the internet works should be able to appreciate).
The somewhat technical explanation is that what Google is doing is implementing something very similar to "Social role theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_Theory), which emphasizes social roles as the defining characteristic used to understand social interaction. While Facebook rather is implementing something more akin to "Symbolic interaction theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interaction).
how about just making it so people can share what they want with who they want, without difficulty? I don't want my software to preach to me about how to democratize my social whatsit, I just want to find a replacement for emailing pictures out to a list of people (notice how GMail wouldn't force me to email the pictures to everyone I know).
But you are profoundly fooling yourself if you believe that that is what Facebook is. If all you want to do is CC a list of people some photos, there are way better tools out there.
I think it's pretty obvious that Facebook has been, from the start, something very different. It is so ingrained in every little design decision and how they promote and talk about the service that it is a tool for managing your public persona. Not a simple communication tool, or replacement for email. Though they obviously offer that kind of functionality as well through Messages and Chat.
Facebook wants to enhance or maybe even change the way you interact socially. It's not a political agenda, but it is definitly a very conscious mission to change a large part of western culture.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about this. So let me state it again to make it clear:
FACEBOOK IS A TOOL FOR MANAGING YOUR PUBLIC PERSONA.
But you are profoundly fooling yourself if you believe that that is what Facebook is. If all you want to do is CC a list of people some photos, there are way better tools out there.
You are profoundly fooling yourself if you think that most Facebook users aren't using it as a way to CC a list of people some photos. I don't know anyone outside of the tech/blog scene who uses Facebook to manage a public persona. It's just a different way to communicate with people.
You are profoundly naive if you believe that is what Facebook is for.
FACEBOOK IS A TOOL TO MAKE YOU (the user, their product) MORE MARKETABLE TO ADVERTISERS (the customers).
By knowing everything about you, they can get better rates from advertisers. Everything else, like photo sharing, and the ability to send messages to other people, or check into place, is designed to get more info about you, and to make sure you don't wander off Facebook to their competitors (if you didn't have picture sharing, you'd be using Picasa or Flicker more -- and that might threaten facebook).
I was talking about Facebook the tool, i.e. how it is actually being used by people. Not Facebook the business model, which I agree with you is exactly as you describe, but is something completely different and separate from how it is perceived and used by ordinary people.
But it's about you, not about everyone else. You can choose what to share and whom to share it with. Any of your "friends" won't know the difference, or care for that matter.
Better because it allows you to simply share your location with your friends without all the rubbish foursquare adds. I know the places I want to go and I am not interested in earning a 'badge' to go there. I just want to let my friends know where I am!
It seems that many people consider Facebook Places way better than Foursquare specifically due to "No tips, no explore, No trending, No badges (worthless, but fun), and less specials than Foursquare"
At the same time, virtually everybody I know who has tried Places has said the exact opposite.
To be fair, I have many friends who use Foursquare for its most obvious and intended purpose, which is to arrange spontaneous meetups without having to text all their friends where they are or to find out where everybody is going. I do it myself, I just pop open 4sq on the phone and see "oh, everybody is at Foo's Bar" and then go there. Easy. Facebook Places makes that simple action incredibly difficult and slow.
Places essentially fails as well because it broadens the userbase too much. My college friends whom I no longer live near couldn't care less what bar I'm at. My local friends who I'm friends with on 4sq do care. So there's a natural separation. I'm only 4sq friends with people I'm likely to see often. I'm Facebook friends with almost everybody I've ever known.
Location as meta is a good thing for Facebook. Location as check-in doesn't fit with Facebook's friend model.
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".
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.
I was wondering about the same thing.
The article is extremely enthousiast about Foursquare, which I had stopped to use over Facebook.
Foursquare adds a gaming layer to check-ins, which tends to get boring with time.
Facebook however adds its social layer, with the ability to passively say "Hey I'm there", and actually be read by people who might care.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.