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.

Check-in at a participating hotel using any geo-location service, from foursquare to the much-anticipated Facebook check-in feature, and TopGuest will give you bonus points and special offers.

TopGuest, which launched last week, syncs with any geo-location service — including foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt, Brightkite, Google Buzz, Google Latitude, Twitter and soon Facebook — and will give you bonus rewards points from participating hotels and airlines or deals from area clubs and restaurants.

Some of the loyalty program partners will give consumers bonus points wherever they check-in and others will provide points only when you check-in from one of their properties, TopGuest says.

TopGuest founder and CEO Geoffrey Lewis may have some insight into Facebook’s much-hyped plan to introduce a geo-location check-in service of its own — one that could give foursquare and Gowalla a run for their money.

Lewis says TopGuest will be integrated with Facebook’s check-in service when it launches “next month.”

Later, when asked about it again, he said Facebook’s service is expected to be introduced “within three months.”

TopGuest presumably has some insight into Facebook’s timing and intentions.

That’s because Founders Fund, which was among the first investors in Facebook, is the lead investor in TopGuest, and Founders Fund managing partner Peter Thiel, who sits on the Facebook board, is among TopGuest’s key advisors.

Consumers don’t have to download or install any software to use TopGuest. They merely have to register on the TopGuest mobile website or TopGuest.com, provide information about their loyalty programs, and then TopGuest syncs with the programs when users check-in at a participating hotel.

TopGuest then drops the bonus points from participating hotel-rewards programs into consumers’ accounts, although the delay can be up to 48 hours, the company says.

TopGuest has an exclusive hotel partner, Standard Hotels, until the beginning of July, and then will announce partnerships with “three of the largest hotel loyalty programs in the world,” Lewis says.

The startup also has pending partnerships with Soho and Tribeca Grand Hotels and Kimpton Hotels, Lewis says.

TopGuest is also in the business of powering points programs for boutique hotels such as Standard, which didn’t previously have a loyalty program.

So, when consumers use Gowalla or other geo-location services to inform their social networks they are sipping a Martini in the lobby of a hotel partner, they may receive 25 bonus points from the hotel and also receive invitations to a popular area club or to a wine tasting, Lewis says.

TopGuest also intends to provide business intelligence to hotel partners and loyalty programs.

The startup will be able to tell HiltonHonors that 20% of their members stay at a competitor’s property when visiting Dallas, for instance, Lewis says, adding that the data would not be personally identifiable.

Canadian travel content and technology firm PlanetEye is having a lot of fun and getting some interesting results after experimenting with FourSquare.

The location-based check-in tool has, until now, either been seen as an game-driven oddity or something that has huge potential but no-one really knows how to harness it.

PlanetEye is trying to change all that after developing some technology to analyse every movement on the system in a given city (only a few companies such as SocialGreat have access to the FourSquare API).

The technology plots the live check-ins on a Google Map so any other user can get a picture of what is happening in any given city.

And because one of the important elements around FourSquare is the idea that certain places become popular either through recommendation or simply by the volume of people checking in, being able to display such information about a destination makes it compelling for DMOs and other organisations.

Another consideration is the level of social detail contained within a person’s FourSquare profile – Person A likes a club, which is also liked by Person B and Person C, who all like a particular restaurant.

And so on and so forth.

The web technology was first tested on check-ins found in PlanetEye’s home town of Toronto and has since been extended to Manhattan.

The content is certainly there. Within a week of turning on the Manhattan feed around 4,000 venues had been discovered. Toronto has already reached 10,000.

PlanetEye chief executive Jonah Sigel says:

“The ability to display almost in real time those places being frequented by users in a given city (two at a time, as limited by FourSquare) provides users with the ultimate benefits from FourSquare. You get a real sense for what people are doing in any particial area. As specials and promotions grow, the added benefit to both users and vendors will grow exponentially.  We will be adding more destinations as permitted by FourSquare.”

Chinese authorities, according to reports, have blocked access to foursquare, and the censorship move likely is tied to the 21st anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Although the Associated Press reports that there were no outward signs of protest at Tiananmen Square in Beijing today, apparently large numbers of foursquare users were checking in from the square as a means to signal their solidarity with the student-led protesters who were killed by government troops on the evening of June 3-4, 1989.

foursquare couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

From the rebellion in Iran to the terrorist attack in India, social media outlets such as Twitter have been used as a communications medium and sometimes a protest vehicle during fast-moving and calamitous events.

Apparently, in the case of Tiananmen Square, people have been using foursquare to register their displeasure with authoritarian policies in China.

Who knew checking-in might one day be viewed as a revolutionary act?

There’s clearly no end to Travelocity mascot Roaming Gnome’s enthusiasm for social media, this week trying location service FourSquare after its play on Chatroulette.

It turns out that the little fella, voiced by British comedian Harry Enfield, joined the FourSquare system last weekend ahead of a promotional trip to London to back a Virgin Atlantic route from Chicago.

The FourSquare service works by allowing users to check in at locations around the world and gain status points against the wider community if they visit a place regularly.

It uses mobile applications to track and manage the system for users and has grown rapidly over recent months, although it has rivals in the shape of Gowalla and will probably face stiff competition when Facebook inevitably launches a location-based check-in service.

A Travelocity official says Gnome’s latest foray into social media is “another effort that shows our strength in social media”.

The move follows Gnome’s experiment with random webcam system Chatroulette in April, a project which was well received by marketers at the company despite the controversial nature of the service.

Soon we will no longer need to talk to one another to find out how we are, where we are and what we are doing.

Think about it. In the old days, when we called someone, we may have asked: “How are you?” We were concerned about a person’s well-being.

Then it became “Where are you?” We were curious about a person’s whereabouts.

But with geo-location devices and geo-location social networks – Foursquare, for example, the new darling of social networks that enables you to check-in at your exact location via your mobile – you can dispense with the where part of the equation.

In Foursquare, users interact with each other by giving tips on places they’ve checked into (long waits, specific bartenders to ask for, etc).

And because of this tip-sharing, Foursquare is emerging as a new sort of Yelp! or TripAdvisor.

Couple this with your Lifestream on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, and your friends will also be able to tell what you are thinking.

So what sort of conversations will we be having, if we have them at all?

We could talk about your Lifestream – say, you are one of those who put updates like, “Having a monumental headache”, we could discuss your health right away.

Or if you say, “arrgh. IKEA ran out of stock of the clear square mirrors! It’s only hexagonal brown toned ones left!” (I found this in my Newsfeed today), I could have a conversation with you around mirrors and colours.

But wait, do you even need to do that dance? Now there are new social media networks like Zobni and Gist which tie deeper and richer information (I use those terms liberally) with “friends” or “connections”.

The promise with Gist is “know more about who you know”. It “connects your email inbox to the web and gives business-critical information about key people and companies” and can work like a personal CRM tool.

In a review, Travis Campbell at Marketing Professor says:

“For marketers, it is all about speed of information, so that you can provide timely (even real time) responses to your contacts, and get the pulse of your followers.

“With Gist, you can get a quick snapshot of what is going on with key contacts, giving you the opportunity to provide more meaningful engagement in the process.”

This means by the time I have read your Gist information, I would have done away with the need for the next few steps of the courtship dance.

Which means we can then get down to the gist of the conversation which is, what, exactly, because by the time I find out all that information, I might have decided, do we really need to talk anymore?

I don’t even have to ask you about how your trip to Antarctica went because I’d have seen it from all the photos, videos and blogs you posted.

Imagine, we’d have nothing left to share because we shared too much.

Travel social network WAYN has been through a number of incarnations over the years and is now considering a move to add gaming functionality as a result of seeing FourSquare’s early success.

WAYN completely overhauled its user interface and proposition in April 2009 as a result of a wide-ranging review of the entire business in the face of competition and growth from the likes of Facebook.

Now, co-founder Jerome Touze admits that the concept of adding some kind of gaming element into the WAYN system has become attractive following the rapid growth and broadly positive critical reaction to FourSquare in late-2009.

Touze says WAYN doesn’t see FourSquare as a competitor – FourSquare is a far narrower service based on location, rather than WAYN’s wider remit of a lifestyle tool – but it is seeing the benefit of broadening its own platform.

“What Foursquare is proving well is the benefit of an exciting gaming platform where the fun comes from the number of places you have checked in and the status you get as a result of that – ie mayors etc.

“This is actually opening our eyes to broaden our horizon to adding a gaming feel to WAYN’s world where users feel more encouraged to contribute and rewarded as a result of that.

Although Touze and his two co-founders appear to be keen on making something work for WAYN members, gaming looks like it’ll come as a revenue-building opportunity rather than something at the heart of the service such as with FourSquare.

“Executing this vision well means we will be able to further unlock commercial value from our users as the micro transaction combined with an engaged gaming environment focused on location based  services can be a powerful proposition if done well.”

Touze says WAYN is currently adding around 10,000 new registrations every day to the system and is also seeing healthy growth to a new “activities” element added to the site in December 2009.

Around 35,000 activities are added to the system every day, he says – activities being broadly defined as places or things to do that members suggest while using the system.