Faces in Places

Facebook has been busy.  Open Graph, new  design and layout changes to Pages, it’s all making it easier for brands to work with and communicate on Facebook. It’s no wonder,  integration is on every marketers to do list. Add a couple of movies featuring the social network and all seems very well for Facebook. And they continue to roll, all systems go.

This week Facebook officially announced it’s rumoured and hotly anticipated new check-in feature – Places. Check-ins aren’t anything new, a few players have been at it for a bit (Yelp, Gowalla, and Foursquare) but even their combined user base doesn’t come close to Facebook’s 500+ million users.  Facebook could easily show up and crush these smaller check-in services, but they didn’t. So why not? Well they’ve all partnered through some form of integration. Why would Facebook even consider this? And why would the others hook up with Facebook?

What’s in it for Facebook.
The learnings from the other services to start. Facebook has sat back and watched and examined the errors and successes of others, and hopefully applied the learnings to their new product. The big reason is easy adoption. Foursquare alone has 3 million users and these users should be considered early adopters by Facebook. Furthermore these early adopters are most likely influencers in their social circles, so by including them through integration, their social graphs who are not into check-ins will be more likely to adopt the habit on a platform they are familiar with.

What’s in it for the Others.
Well really it’s an extended lease on life for the others. They have the opportunity to evolve their service to integrate with Facebook. This for them is a much better option than being trampled by the giant. For them to survive they need to adopt and evolve plain and simple. They too will also gain from the added exposure to new users through Facebook. Foursquare had their biggest day for sign-ups after the announcement of Facebook places. At least for the time being, Foursquare is reaping the benefits of Places.

So how does it all work?
Although the service is not available to Canadians yet, there is an iPhone app, a HTML5  based mobile site (http://touch.facebook.com) and a desktop client to be released in the future. Basically users can check-in to venues, see who’s around them , and find out “cool new places”, sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it?

When a user checks in, the update appears on the Place page of the venue, and a message is posted to a friend’s wall. At that time, a list of friends will briefly appear, and the user has the option to either check their friends in, or be checked in by  others.

According to Facebook If a friend checks you in, you will receive a message. You will have the option to approve or reject the check-in. If approved, you will appear as checked-in. If you refuse to be checked in, you can still be tagged, if you allow it. Users also have the option to un-tag themselves, this works similar to photo tagging on Facebook.

At this point it’s unclear what opportunities advertisers and brands will have with Places. I imagine a similar deals and offers currently available in Foursquare could be in the works.  So will you be checking yourself and friends in using places? Or do you just find this way too creepy?