Spotted: Facebook Location In Action. Meet Facebook Places!
We're sitting here in the waiting room at Facebook waiting for the supposed location event to start. Facebook won't say officially what the event is about, but it seems like everyone knows. And now we know for sure.
Context & Ripple Effects
The rumor arc that started with TechCrunch's May report on Facebook's coming location product closes today: reporters waiting at Facebook's Palo Alto event have spotted the product in action, and it's called Facebook Places. BoomTown had framed Wednesday's mystery event around location, location, location just two days ago, and the pickup across BoomTown and GigaOM shows how much of the tech press treated this as a foregone conclusion worth attending anyway.
What makes the confirmation consequential rather than merely tidy is who else has been building on Facebook's absence: Glympse shipped real-time location sharing through Facebook back in April, one of several third-party services filling the gap while Facebook itself stayed out of geo.
First-order effects
- Facebook Places makes check-ins a native feature of the world's largest social network, putting Foursquare and Gowalla into direct competition with a platform they previously relied on for distribution and identity.
- Developers like Glympse, which built real-time location sharing on top of Facebook in April, now compete with first-party functionality occupying the same slot.
Second-order effects
- Foursquare and Gowalla are pushed to differentiate on game mechanics, merchant deals, and data partnerships rather than the check-in itself, since Facebook can replicate the core gesture overnight for an audience orders of magnitude larger.
- Local merchants gain a second, much bigger channel for check-in offers, shifting bargaining power over location-based promotions toward whoever controls the social graph.
Third-order effects
- If Places normalizes sharing location as casually as sharing status, location becomes another layer of the social graph feeding Facebook's ad targeting — and standalone check-in apps survive only as value-added skins on top of platforms' own location infrastructure.
- A pattern of large social platforms absorbing hot mobile categories natively (photos, then location) would push venture-backed consumer apps toward features platforms won't copy or toward acquisition as an exit.
The trend: Major social platforms are folding breakout mobile behaviors like check-ins into their own products, forcing standalone startups to compete on what the platform doesn't ship.