The web’s worst kept secret of recent months finally became a reality yesterday when Facebook unveiled its widely anticipated Facebook Places location tool.
Apart from inevitably having a massive impact on existing geo services such as Gowalla and Foursquare, Facebook Places opens up a fantastic array of possibilities for the travel brands and travellers alike.
The reason why Facebook Places will make travel companies sit and up listen to ideas around geo services and location check-in is easy: 500 million members having the ability to pinpoint where they are and share information with friends is suddenly very important, and more than just a quirky tool that tech media luvvies FourSquare and Gowalla have produced.
In other words: volume and audience penetration will trigger a change in thinking.
So how does Facebook Places work?
Well, pretty much the same as its counterparts. A check-in tool allows users to see where they are on a map (via a mobile device’s GP – for now, only on the iPhone) and simply mark their position and activity on their profile wall.
Over time the system – similar, once again, to Foursquare and Gowalla – will begin to build a database so the user can select from a pre-populated list depending on the location.
Facebook hasn’t included the gaming element pioneered by Foursquare, so there are no mayorships or badges to be won. It’s a simple location engine, nothing more.
So why the fuss? There are two interesting elements in play here, covering how companies and travellers might use Facebook Places.
1. Travellers
The simpler of the two is about individual members of Facebook. While it may have taken time for Facebook to evolve to its current state, adding location check-in seems pretty much the most natural thing the social network could do.
Hundreds of thousands of active members are posting status updates, pictures, video and links about their activities – adding a tool so people can pinpoint where such things took place is obvious.
Travellers will be notifying their friends of their location, commenting on or posting media relating to destinations, hotels, aircraft and other travel services. They will be making arrangements to meet friends at a destination, collectively posting confirmation of their arrival, etc.
For the everyday traveller the tool will simply make Facebook a better, more fun, more interactive social network.
2. Travel companies
For brands, Facebook Places is an opportunity and a challenge.
A hotel, airport, airline, activity, destination service will surely be encouraging users to check-in on Facebook, thus sharing a branded location around an individual’s network.
Clever brands will soon fathom out a way of incorporating check-ins into a module on their fan pages, or illustrate which fans have visited a location or product it runs.
The amount of potential data available through monitoring check-ins will be extraordinary, giving companies a unique picture of what types of people are visiting a location, what they do once they are there, who they hang out with, what are their other interests.
A process of dealing with both positive and negative feedback via check-ins will be something that needs to be tackled quickly.
Almost every travel product will have some kind of “I HATE this hotel – it’s dirty and the staff are rude”-type check-in soon enough, but how they address such messages, especially as there are (inevitably for Facebook) complicated opt-in and opt-out options for displaying check-in data.
Finally…
Marrying Facebook Places, Facebook Questions and its existing features and suddenly the social network that people play around with a lot (too much!) takes on a major new place at the centre of the web – and should only be ignored at a company’s peril.
This could well be the breakthrough moment for location based services and as stated, the implications for travel are significant. How will Google react will be another interesting thing to watch.
Any idea where the location data come from?
One of the issues with 4square is that it’s already loaded with crap. There are many official venues, but anyone can add clones – and in many countries and cities there seem to be mostly user generated locations with obvious duplicates.
While I bet data quality is impeccable for Silicon Valley, I’m wondering what will happen when 500M excited people start entering locations.
This of course presents an interesting economic opportunity for “verified” locations – not unlike what Google is doing with Places.
Is nobody concerned about travelers posting that they’re in some foreign country, and potentially getting robbed, etc? Seems to me that there are a few privacy and security concerns with this, especially with Facebook’s standard policy of always opting people in on new features.
Especially sneaky is that by default, friends can check you in at places. So you don’t even need to be using this service on your iPhone for your location to made public. Personally, I’m not interested, and disabled the whole thing.
That would only be possible if you turned on the service. The first time you get tagged it will ask you if you want to opt in, so that would only be an issue for people that made it an issue for themselves.
Fanboy.
I know, I defended them and it backfired.. Thanks tech crunch/FB.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/19/facebook-places-privacy/
Very cool. I give FB about a month before they build in a gaming / badge element, especially giving FB’s userbase being so game-obsessed. Maybe they’ll start calling it PlaceVille?
I wonder if FB will add a check-in prompt every time a user uploads a photo to their profile – seems like this would be a good way to drive usage.
@pete
Placeville! Like it…
Better than Location Wars.
Facebook may well step not just into Foursquare/Gowalla/etc. territory, but the likes of TripAdvisor (shortly after TripAdvisor announced their Facebook Connect – Kevin, I remember reading about it on Tnooz, but can’t find the link now).
As 500m people check in to hotels, airports, restaurant, tourist attractions, etc. and start leaving photos, comments and tips, Facebook will quickly build up an impressive database not just of travel places around the World, but travel places visited by your friends.
@martino
here you go: http://www.tnooz.com/2010/06/14/news/tripadvisor-uses-facebook-to-create-trip-friends-personalised-tips-engine/
klm
Goes without saying that with any new Facebook feature there are a raft of privacy implications — in this case being able to check in your friends is pretty dire.
Nevertheless can see advantages to bringing a whole new subset of locations online and FB certainly has the scale (assuming they’re accurate — something that isn’t the case with Google Places: even hotels mark themselves in the wrong place all to regularly).
Just hope this doesn’t mean there is going to be a new deluge of Tweets via FB noting they just checked in wherever.
Placeville – like it
KM:
Watched press conf; Zuckerberg missed great opportunity to use Beatles song: “There are places I remember”, but then again the Beatles were split-up by the time Zuckerberg was born…#OldTimer
There are places I remember:
There are places I remember all my life,
Though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places have their moments
Of lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I loved them all.
And with all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these mem’ries lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
And I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them.
In my life I loved you more.
And I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them.
In my life I loved you more
In my life I loved you more
@CravenTravels
Best comment on this hot topic of the day by a mile!
The privacy concerns have certainly received attention – what else is new when Facebook makes an announcement! There are already a number of posts on the topic at Lifehacker on how to change the settings http://bit.ly/d4FAN5 and Mashable has a video at http://bit.ly/c7D7wu on the check-in of others.
Also found a good post this morning re your friends being able to tag your house (say at a party) but you then not being able to delete it (you can request deletion, but seems you need quite a few to do so) http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/08/privacy-groups-facebook-already-facing-off-over-places.ars
While the above isn’t really travel related, in travel, competing businesses could example tag the location of their competitors hotel — in the wrong place/next to a meat-packing factory etc — this incorrect data gets spun off via api into 3rd party websites and the affected business has no real scope for immediate remedy, because they didn’t add the marker in the first place.
Interesting.
Great article and good comments.
All in all a very important milestone day for all of us in the location and travel businesses. In 2010, people should be focused on the “what”, “why” and “How” and not the “where”.
Ask yourself how often you use your favorite outdoor mobile mapping app to search, versus your mobile browser to search….
Kevin
On my recent SW France trip, that’s exactly what my girlfriend (after being annoyed with me for checking in to foursquare for the 5th time today) asked: “What’s the point of you playing with your iPhone? Can you actually tell me if there are any interesting places to see here?” Me: “well, no, I can tell you where places are, but not why/if they are worth seeing”.
I wait with interest on how Facebook places can be integrated with guides like mine. I use Foursquare, and can see it’s huge potential locally, but I think it will struggle to go mainstrain, whereas Facebook (providing they sort out any privacy issues) will as Joe has said will be breakthrough moment for location based services.
Two sides? You mean one. Fanboy is right.
FB Places is like a knee jerk reaction that includes poor functionality and endless spam. It’s trash…. *JUST BECAUSE FB DOES SOMETHING & THEY HAVE A HUGE NETWORK *DOES NOT* MEAN IT’S MEANINGFUL*
It’s articles like this that are wasting our industry’s time by making people think FB is a commerce filled marketplace when it’s really just narcissist’s paying attention to gaming.
@hhotelconsult…
Not quite sure I said FB is a commerce filled marketplace, did I?
FB is a meeting point on the web, that’s all. It just so happens that lots of people meet there, that’s why it’s important to take into consideration the many things that they do.
But, should companies avoid ALL activities that have little or no commercial value?
Anyway, travel is about locations/destinations, people in them, people wanting to go to them. If FB introduces a level functionality that is focused on the location of a user, then it has, I would argue, quite a lot of relevance to the travel sector.
Nevertheless, apologies for wasting your own and the industry’s time by simply highlighting such opportunities.
I think @hhconsultant is wrong in a deeper sense: the fact is that Facebook captures the social network of a large number of people very well. For tools/companies which can exploit this social network – and the additional augmented information such as “place” – it’s a gold mine because we don’t have to try to recreate this on our own.
No one is meeting on Facebook. Look at group interaction… the dialogue is all ME ME ME
http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2010/09/01/facebook-brand-pages-community-interaction-what-do-we-know/
What’s more, 70% of people who like a “brand” don’t think that means the brand can market to them.http://www.marketingvox.com/why-marketers-often-get-it-wrong-with-facebook-047627/?utm_campaign=rssfeed&utm_source=mv&utm_medium=textlink
You *MUST* exist where people commune. I have booking engines on my FB hotel pages…. but none of the omniture analytics tells there is any real interaction… no one jumps from FB to branded pages. It’s not how people on FB consume.
So we exist there.. info, etc. Post too much and they hide your streams…. http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2010/06/21/hidden-streams-on-facebook-pages-profiles-over-sharing-and-attention-curation-as-equity/
To David… you *can’t* create it on your own. I think our industry is finally understanding that you can’t compete and you need to exist where these people congregate.
But the idea of FB as a useful tool is ludicrous. It’s a comment card where people wear your brand like a pair of sunglasses but don’t want any meaningful interaction with the business.
I know I am passionate about this… and completely respect your opinions. COMPLETELY. But everyone is wrong on this. FB is not an opportunity yet. It’s either be patient and give it time to develop into something functional, or realize that the idea of a consumer existing on facebook just isn’t real. You have people posting vacation photos or playing games… but they don’t want us in their streams.
At least not yet.
Dick Fenyman said it best: “in any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion… fence sitting is an art, and it’s difficult, and it’s important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It’s just better to have action, isn’t it than to sit on the fence? Not if you’re not sure which way to go, it isn’t.”
You are providing the outlet for discussion, and it’s vital and I love it and it’s awesome.
It’s just that rushing headlong into FB without any real reason other than it’s a huge network… it’s lunacy. The amount of wasted dollars towards that network is a joke…. at least for travel. For Old Spice or Dos Equus… maybe it’s great.
But it’s too soon to shrug our shoulders and say “this is the best it’s going to get” and allow damaged and unstable networks of zero real interaction to expend all our time.
Five great enemies to peace inhabit with us: avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride. If those enemies were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace. ~Francesco Petrarch
….Deep
“in any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion… fence sitting is an art, and it’s difficult, and it’s important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It’s just better to have action, isn’t it, than to sit on the fence? Not if you’re not sure which way to go, it isn’t.” (p. 100)
oops. =)
Skepticism sure, but I like the Tao too… so this conversation went in a lovely direction. Just forgot to attribute Feynman. =)
“in any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion… fence sitting is an art, and it’s difficult, and it’s important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It’s just better to have action, isn’t it, than to sit on the fence? Not if you’re not sure which way to go, it isn’t.” – Richard Feynman