Facebook Places: A Hot Potato for Location

Last week Facebook revealed its new location play, Places. My friend Aaron Strout wrote a good analysis of the service and I joined the discussion in the comments. My initial thoughts were fairly disparaging about Places. It seemed to me that Facebook had jumped in with both feet and missed the mark badly. There is no incentive for users to check-in with Places, other than geo-advertising, which has yet to be confirmed, there is no business play. Over all it seemed to be a disappointing attempt, which had been my original thoughts a few months ago when rumors started to circulate that Facebook was interested in building a location app.

After I had left the comments on Aaron’s post I came across the news that Facebook had acquired a location service called Hot Potato. You may not have heard of Hot Potato if you aren’t a complete location geek like me. Basically Hot Potato is Foursquare meets GetGlue. Ok that analogy probably didn’t help you if you aren’t familiar with GetGlue (I’m assuming here that you know of Foursquare). GetGlue is a rating/check-in/sharing site that is focused on your online travels. As you peruse sites like Amazon you can “like”, “dislike” or mark something as “not for me”.

Start a discussion about a book, movie, celebrity or any other topic and you can eventually become the “Guru” of that topic. I was amused to find myself the Guru of Chris Brogan/Julien Smith’s “Trust Agents” but very pleased when as a reward for being that Guru I was sent a free copy of Brian Solis book Engage! That is the rewards program through GetGlue.

So back to Places what does this all mean for the Social Location Sharing space? Instead of just checking in at a location, with one app you will be able to check in with your activities, if you are sitting at home reading a book – you can check in. If you are sitting watching a TV show, check-in (imagine what Neilsen ratings is going to do with this data!). The ability to tie all this into the Facebook Social Graph, and provide targeted ads, and more importantly targeted rewards makes for a much more compelling offering for both the user and the businesses looking to leverage this as part of their marketing communications channel.

Of course there are the usual privacy issues that come with every iteration of Facebook, and there are some genuine concerns, however, Facebook did make an immediate post about how to set these so that you only reveal your location to the people you want to know it or not at all for that matter. The ability to check-in a friend at a location without their consent or approval seems an odd feature and I am still thinking this one through in terms of its use. Perhaps it is going to be revised with the rollout of the Hot Potato features as that team ramps up.

All in all, I would say that Facebook has definitely made a serious play in this space now and are going to be one to watch over the coming months as they integrate existing Hot Potato features and roll out new ones.

Are you using Places? What are your thoughts?