Facebook announced a new Places product Wednesday evening that will let users check-in from a mobile device, see who is around them, let friends or the public know where they are, and find interesting, new places.
The announcement extends, yet again, the reach of the immensely popular social network, in hopes that the new service will convince its 500 million users to feed more information as they move around in the physical world.
The product is not unlike the popular Foursquare location-based service, and lets you “check-in” at a place and send a notification to your friends who are nearby. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Places has been in testing for a few months, and will be available to U.S. Facebook users starting Thursday.
Zuckerberg said he knew the product was ready when he was showing it off to his girlfriend at a restaurant in a town he didn’t usually go to. She noticed that some friends of theirs she hadn’t seen in a while were at a restaurant next door, and suggested they go say hello.
“It was when that moment happened, that serendipitous moment, that we knew we were ready to go,” Zuckerberg said.
The feature works through a mobile app or browser, where a user wanting to “check-in” can search for a place nearby or add a place to “check-in” to. A user can then write about they are doing, who they are with, what they think of the place and upload a photo.
Each location gets it own newsfeed, where you can see a list of your friends who have been at a place, even if their visit was months earlier.
The point isn’t to make your location totally public, according to Michael Eyal Sharon, Facebook’s lead developer for Places.
“Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world,” Sharon said.
Facebook VP Chris Cox took to the stage to give an emotional speech about the service, imagining Places as a way to get people to go out and connect more, and as a way for people to create stories, saved for posterity, that are tied to a place.
“Technology does not need to estrange us from one another,” Cox said, imagining a scenario of a person going to a bar and being able to see anecdotes from friends’ earlier visits. “The physical reality comes alive with the human stories we have told there.”
“Stories are going to be pinned to a physical location so that in 20 years our children will go to Ocean Beach and their phone will tell them this is the place their parents had their first kiss, and here’s the picture they took afterward, and here’s what their friends had to say,” Cox said.
With Place, you can tag photos and even check your own friends in, by tagging them in a photo or status update. For privacy reasons, if you don’t allow your friends to check you in, then the update won’t show up on your stream. Check-ins also default to being visible to friends-only, though users can change this to wider settings, including to being visible to the entire web.
Users can also remove these tags, just as they can with photos, and users can decide not to allow check-in tagging at all.
The service will be available on the web tomorrow, rolling out to all U.S. users over the next few days.
Outside the United States, users will be able to see check-ins, but won’t be able to check-in themselves immediately. The iPhone app will be updated soon, while Blackberry and Android users will need to wait or use Facebook in a browser.
Facebook is also partnering with a number of companies for the service, including the net’s leading location check-in services Foursquare and Gowalla, as well as Yelp, which also offers check-ins. The companies will use Places beta API to read and write to and from Facebook.
The inclusion of three of the most popular check-in services comes as some surprise, given that many in the tech press had assumed the Facebook check-in service would directly compete with them.
“This is a great thing for smaller location services,” said Foursquare’s Holger Luedorf. “We will continue innovating and have a number of things and want to create a better tips and to-dos service. We will build upon this location check-in and we are looking forward to exploring how we will leverage the Places API.”
With Yelp, every time you check in using the mobile app, you can share to no one, to only your Yelp friends or to Facebook.
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But I’ve done it. I suspect many of you have done it. Just last weekend, careening south through rural Missouri in a rented Pontiac, I sent and received a dozen text messages with my sister as we coordinated the logistics of a family emergency. I was upset, tired, and finding being a safe driver difficult enough without trying to peck out letters on a glowing touchscreen with my thumb.
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