August 23, 2010 by Andre
An announcement this week from social networking giants Facebook sees the launch of a new smartphone function called ‘Places’. Places enables people to update their status to show people where they are, when they are on the move. It constitutes Facebook’s first location-based service, enabling people to share information about where they are eating, playing or shopping.
The Places feature follows on the back of other existing services such as Gowalla and Foursquare. It is currently only available as a US iPhone application, or by entering Facebook’s smartphone site. However, there are plans to roll out the new feature to the 500 million members of the networking site in the very near future. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook has commented: “This is meaningful because you can stay connected with your friends around you.”
The new feature employs smartphone GPS technology to enable users to locate their current location and access a list of places nearby. The action then enables them to publish their location details to their news feed facility on their own page. They also have the ability to tag friends whom they are with, to distribute location information among a group of people travelling together, providing friends have already updated their location on the site.
Product vice president Chris Cox commented: “While home and work are two of the most important places in people’s lives, Places tries to tap into the third most important. This third place is the one we end up talking about a lot. I went to a movie, I saw a band, I went to a bar. So much of the interesting stuff in our lives happens in this small amount of time and we want to make that come alive. The worst portrait of Facebook is people at home just looking at pictures of other people having fun. This is exactly the opposite. This is a very participatory, real-world kind of thing.”
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