Facebook Places goes live, will it change how we behave?
Facebook Places which went live in the UK this morning could herald a new age of location based social networking.
Sure we’ve had Foursquare and Gowalla for a while, but these location services have limited appeal, partly because of their ‘game’ like elements and partly because they have a very small reach, Foursquare reaches just three million people. Facebook on the other hand has more than half a billion members across the globe and more than half of people in Britain are members.
As I show in the report for tonight’s programme, Facebook Places works as an application on the iPhone or via the Facebook website on most smart phones. Like Foursquare, it allows you to “check in” at a particular geographic location and either see if you have any friends nearby, or post a status update related to the location.
One use is clearly to find friends near you. I can imagine heading out with friends to a bar in Soho and maybe switching it on and finding out that some of our mutual friends are somewhere down the road. If so and we all end up meeting up, it will be a real world social interaction that comes about thanks to technology. It’s really interesting for me how technology, something that in the past isolated us, maybe in our bedrooms taping away at a game, now unites us with the people who are important to us. The privacy settings are such that it is possible to share your location with all half a billion people on Facebook or just a list of your closest friends. Indeed, you might not want anyone to other than yourself knowing where you are and have been. That’s fine too, it could work as a 21 century diary, prompting you to remember key moments and the more forgetable moments in your life.
So far so good, Facebook are really keen to avoid the privacy debates that have dogged them this year. But there is one slight issue, while by default your location is hidden from non-friends, it is by default your information is still viewable by anyone who is either at or looking up a specific location. This does mean that it is possible for people you don’t know to know where you are, which will upset some. But in the real world, people you don’t know are able to see where you are, if they are physically there too. But I guess as we don’t walk around with name badges on it is slightly different.
I also looked at other applications using location data. Grindr is one notable example. A US company, it allows gay and bisexual men to find a partner based on how far away in metres they are from a potential match.
But what do you think? Are location data services are to far?
There are 2 comments on this post
You referred here and on air on Friday to Facebook’s recent privacy scandals. What about the scandal of Pinknews publishing people’s IP addresses? Or is that off limits for C4 News?
All I can say is I cant wait to see what Facebook intend to do with it. e.g. Virtual achievements like Four-square, Incorporate golden eggs. As I’m sick already of people saying “Checked into home/sofa/bed! lol” So what! there is nothing new or exciting about that! Ehh.
Incentives, Rewards and points off. Surely that’s got to be better for both S,G and companies.
Besides wouldn’t it be better to be rewarded for going somewhere new every day virtually as-swell!