Facebook unveils Places – New location check-in service

Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. Facebook unveiled their new location check-in service called Places. Currently only available on phones that support W3 geolocation and apparently only to US based users – it sends a clear message to existing check-in service providers FourSquare and GoWalla – ‘watch out’. With 20% of existing FourSquare users who are already pushing their check-ins to Facebook creating the Places feature was a logical step. This will help Facebook capture those users and keep them on Facebook rather then use FourSquare. Granted not everyone will ditch FourSquare and to a lesser extent GoWalla, but you can rest assured both companies will see a significant decline in users in the coming months.

I am not sure this spells the end for the two services as Facebook hinted they may partner with FourSquare and GoWalla to help them populate the usage uptake for this utility within Facebook but it certainly doesn’t bode well. Ultimately any kind of possible partnership would only serve Facebook interests in the long run as users would get tired of checking in on two separate platforms. I simply can’t see any company who’s main business is check-in/location based services like FourSquare, GoWalla, Yelp et. al. competing against Facebook’s user base.

Essentially these companies simply served as ‘proof of concept’ and showed Facebook that this functionality does indeed warrant the expense in developing it. Indeed this feature has been 8 months in the making and was finally announced today so FourSquare and GoWalla had plenty of time to bulk up their offering to better compete against Facebook, but in the end I am afraid it will be an uphill battle. FourSquare should of taken that $100 million from Yahoo back in April, too late for that now. I guess time will tell if my predictions are correct or if FourSquare’s and GoWalla’s demise has been greatly exaggerated.

Tags: check-in, facebook places, foursquare, gowalla, location based service