It looks like all the speculation was correct. At a press event which was streamed live, Facebook finally announced their location initiative. It’s called Facebook Places and, while it shares some of the same features, it’s not the same as a Foursquare or Gowalla. In fact, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and MyTown representatives were at the event.
First and foremost, Facebook Places comes with a developer API which allows easy integration with 3rd party services. It seems that the best course of action for Facebook in implementing location was to be very careful about privacy. To this end, they have basically outsourced the “fun” parts of location to 3rd party services via the API.
Within Facebook, you can to check you and your friends into a place. Yes, you can check your friend into a venue. Facebook Places is closely tied to tagging, so that users can build a story about where they are, who they’re with, and what they might be doing. Leveraging their existing features, Facebook can now give you a clearer picture of what your status may have been at a certain time at a specific place.
Unlike tagging a friend in a photo, the Facebook Places API will ask you if it’s okay to tag you at a location first. You can authorize the location tag, or deny it. Your location check-ins follow your privacy settings, so only your friends will se where you are unless you have your defaults set to “Everyone.”
One interesting feature of Facebook Places is “People Here Now.” This is only visible for a limited amount of time and will show you other people checked in to the same location as you. This is similar to the venue pages on Foursquare. Find interesting people who you don’t know wherever you happen to be. Of course, you can choose not to be shown in this section at all.
As far as third-party integration, when checking in on Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, or Yelp, you will now be able to also check-in on Facebook. MyTown completely revamped their application so that it would work with the new Facebook API.
While it looks like Facebook thought about privacy while designing Places, you can also tell that they wanted it to be as open as possible. Expect to see some privacy backlash in the near future. Many of the privacy settings are there, but we all know how easy those are to find. Also, some options are just not available. For instance, when a friend checks you into a place, you can say “Yes” or “Not Now.” There is not a “No” option.
To get started with Facebook places, grab the new iPhone app or visit http://touch.facebook.com in your mobile HTML5-enabled browser.
via The Next Web, Facebook Blog