Facebook enhances mobile play with Places
Looks to dominate social location and create full third party platform
Published: 19 August, 2010
READ MORE: Facebook | Location
Facebook has emerged from the shadows this year. It has built its market lead in the important social networking application, but it is only recently that it has looked to harness the way social nets change broader web and mobile behavior. It has taken its first serious political stance in opposing the Google-Verizon net neutrality proposals, and it is steadily expanding its social app into a fully fledged developer platform, challenging Google to create the primary consumer web services framework. Yesterday, it unveiled a key component, its long awaited location sharing offering, Places.
'SoLo' - the combination of social networking and location awareness - is a key driver of mobile data uptake and expanded mobile usage patterns, and so is of intense interest to internet players and carriers. Google and Nokia have been enhancing their location and mapping services, but are both also-rans on the social side. Now Facebook is filling in its own location maps, with a firm eye on mobile devices.
At a press event at the company's headquarters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Places, allowing users to share their locations with one another and use messaging, social nets and recommendations to discover information about their surroundings. Places will be available from today, with the main focus, predictably, on smartphones.
Facebook members can use their handsets to update their location in the same way they post a Facebook update, and indicate who they are with, provided they are all Facebook friends. There are privacy controls that default to 'friends only'. Places uses the same tagging system that underpins Facebook's photo hosting service. Product manager Michael Sharon said the firm would update its mobile web service to support Places and also roll out an upgrade to its iPhone app this week.
As with other Facebook functionality, there is a broader agenda to build up a third party developer base and extend the platform to become a default social-location framework for other apps and web services. Sharon said the greatest potential lay in making Places available through third party apps, not just Facebook sites, and programmers will get an API (application programming interface) in future, which will support full read, write, and search of locations. Initial partners include Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and Boovah, which will build Places check-ins into their own services. For instance, when a Yelp or Foursquare user checks in, this alert will also be pushed to Facebook.
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