Facebook Places: What are Facebook users saying about Places one week later

By Wayne Sutton Facebook Featured Geo-Location August 26, 2010

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It has been one week since Mark Zuckerberg along with the Facebook Location team stood on stage, told us scary stories about sharing life experiences around locations and announced Facebook Places. The announcement sent ripples through the location space as Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and MyTown each had a moment to share how excited they were to see Facebook launch Places and how they we’re early beta testers of the places read/write API. After months of rumors and dealing with a backlash of privacy concerns from previous updates Facebook Places was now live. You can now visit touch.Facebook.com or launch the Facebook iPhone to preform the following seven core Facebook Places task and more.

1. Create a location
2. Check into a location
3. Tag a friend and check them into a location
4. Like a location
5. Comment on a location
6. Claim a location if you’re a business
7. Mark a location a duplicate or inaccurate

As expected some have called Facebook places a Foursquare killer, others have said Facebook Places main target is Google and Yelp. It was misquoted that Foursquare founder @Dens called Facebook places boring although a lot of people tend to agree with the statement and more have said, Facebook Places just misses point altogether. Regardless Facebook Places is hear to stay and being used by early adapters, geeks and users who would never checked in before via another location-based service. I asked via a Facebook Status Update the question “Has anyone stopped using other check-in/location based apps since Facebook Places was announced”? Here are a few of the responses:

Adam Holden-Bache Nope and don’t plan to. Just add it to the list of check-in apps. Wondering how this category is going to play out. I figure we’ll start seeing some services merge, others drop off, etc. Anyone have any projections?
Anjuan Simmons Nope. Foursquare is still my location based service of choice.
Herb Hernandez No still using multiple. But I’m seeing people who NEVER used Foursquare or Gowalla (for example) now checking in on Facebook.
Ryan Boyles No. still haven’t tried Place yet. I just got my new iPhone 4 last night. Using Triout only for now.
L Curtis Muldrew Still using Foursquare
Roger Benningfield I quit messing with Foursquare and Gowalla a long time ago, since no one I knew actually used either. But having similar capability in FB means checking in actually has an impact on people who might care.
Corvida Raven No in fact I forgot to use both of them today.
Anjuan Simmons ‎@Corvida: You raise a great point. Location based services won’t be adopted by the masses until they become easier to use. There is no reason why these services can’t automatically check me into places I frequently visit. They should also recommend nearby places to visit. Smartphones know where I am and apps need to do a better job of using that information.
Niguel Valley I still use nope Gowalla.