Facebook launching Facebook Places (check-ins) | Hacker News Reader

Facebook launching Facebook Places (check-ins)

apps.facebook.com

71 pointstlrobinson71 comments

Rod Begbie asked a great question at the top of the Q&A... "How do I take down the address of my home if it gets listed and becomes popular such that FB makes it public?" (FB said that popular locations become public if enough people check in, so imagine you are having a party at your house...).

The answer is you can't, and Facebook clearly hadn't thought of that in their user stories and use cases. The group on stage didn't seem to feel it was an issue either.

For all of Chris Cox's pretentious guff (dude, give me a break) about their interest in sociology and FB respecting the "3rd place" concept, I think it shows how out of touch with "IRL" issues FB product development is. I feel they see everything as a 'data problem to solve' not the people + human behaviors that are really going on.

The answer was interesting though: there had to be social proof behind a place before it would be available to a larger audience. In other words, even if somebody maliciously added your apartment as a place to checkin, barely anybody would see it unless they were in your direct network of friends.

well, from what I heard the more popular a place is the more public it becomes to the point that it could be come 'totally public' if it reaches a threshold (no mention what they are, though).

And as they were clear to state all the way through - this is about creating persistent stories that are permanently attached to a place page on FB - so presumably your home's place page becomes public.

That concerns me about having private parties in private homes (pretty typical use case)

"That concerns me about having private parties in private homes (pretty typical use case)"

I'd be interested in finding out how they calculated popularity in this case. How many parties and how well-attended would they have to be in order to automatically make a home a public place?

Knowing Facebook, I'd expect something ridiculously low at first, then public outrage, then small adjustments until people actually swallow it.

Perhaps the becoming 'totally public' of a place is contingent on the non-intersection of the sociality of some x number of checkins. I.e., if you have a party at you place but everyone who checks in is within 1-2 degrees of your social graph, then Facebook recognizes it's a well known place within a very local user subset. And doesn't make it public.

Also — time could be a simple indicator. If a place (i.e., your house) suddenly has 100 checkins over one day only to have no serious checkin traffic again for weeks, then that wouldn't be a completely public location either.

Could be... we don't know.

The lack of transparency and the potential downside is concerning, no?

Would you trust Facebook's algorithms for this? Facebook still tries to suggest I care about distant friends' Farmville updates.

Imagine how bad it would be if someone's "Having coffee at work" tweet/facebook message was public!! Then people could look up their name in the phone book and rob them!

Oh wait.. even worse! Imagine if everyone worked basically the same hours - then people could predict when your house is likely to be empty and rob them!!

Oh wait.. we already have that. Better panic already I guess.

First, we don't have it on the scale of Facebook yet.

Second, everyone knows their Twitter/FourSquare posts are going to be public. Not so with FB.

Third, Facebook is the one with the established reputation of making public by default user information that many assume to be private.

I think the point is less about telling people that you're away and more about publicly broadcasting the location of other people's private information.

I can assure you I'm not a privacy nut, but I think we all have the right to keep the latitude and longitude of our homes hidden from 500 million other people if we want.

About that: http://pleaserobme.com/

This doesn't make Facebook, Foursquare et al evil. People should know better. However, common sense should tell these companies it's probably best to keep home addresses private to avoid law suits/scandals. It just seems like the right thing to do.

heck, they could just walk up to your house, knock on the door, and if no one answers - rob the house!

This is going to be hilarious when 4Chan or some other spontaneous group figures out how to game the system.

edit: this is also why they shouldn't be called engineers or scientists. They're charlatans with their supposed interest in sociology. If they were proper computer scientists/software engineers, they would have fully thought through what would happen.

Some facts to think about:

a) Marc Andreessen is on the board of Facebook. b) Facebook started working on this 8 months ago. c) Foursquare had turned down acquisition offers from FB d) Andreessen and Horowitz invested in Foursquare ~ 2 months ago.

Not saying that Andreessen wouldn't want to have a hedge going on, but if there were complete certainty that FB places would crush 4sq in his mind, they wouldn't have invested.

what if they invested precisely because they thought that Foursquare would get some extra "distribution" (and validation of what they're doing) via and thanks to Facebook?

True. FourSquare is also still in a position where they can pivot.

The facebook status updates didn't kill twitter, but I think twitter became more of marketing tool than a tool to communicate with friends. Maybe that's just me, but I think competing with FB forces a company to focus on where they can compete.

Only true techies use 4square anyway. How many people do you know that actually use it? And if you live on the west coast, don't raise your hand.

I can also see this taking over Yelps as well. They have the same thing as 4square but probably not as popular.

Surprised that Foursquare and Gowalla actually took part in this.

The underlying data they have on location and check-ins is basically being given to Facebook. That means that the only real value left in those apps is what they have to offer on top of that, which is not super defensible, whereas Facebook gets to be the underlying platform where there is real value.

Sounds like they're doing this to avoid being totally overthrown by the incumbent. They're picking the better of 2 bad situations.

I upvoted you, but was your mom on Facebook 3, 4, 5 years ago when it wasn't what it is today?

It is odd, because, and this is my feeling, both of these services (Foursquare and Gowalla) provide a much richer, more exciting LBS.

http://www.quora.com/Are-Foursquare-and-Gowalla-going-to-sur... is a pretty interesting response to this.

Facebook is the current Microsoft: if they are going to make a move in your space, it's better to be in it than under it.

You will apparently be able to opt out of being tagged in someone else's checkin, and the default privacy of a checkin is friends only. I have been critical of facebook's privacy policy, but this is promising.

...until they change the default, as they did with name, photo, friends, work history, education history, likes, interests, activities, and others to globally public with no privacy setting.

Does anyone else find this live coverage ("Live from Facebook HQ!") with interviews on-site with the developers a little ... weird?

Does any other site out there offer live coverage of their own feature announcements?

Wolfram Alpha did. Apparently nobody told them they were launching a website, not a spaceship.

But they would argue that the impact on humanity is greater than sending men in space for science. ;-p

I watched for about 20 seconds before getting weirded out. The interviewing 'journalist's' last name was Zuckerberg, which seemed like an odd choice.

That's Mark's sister.

Does anyone else have 500 million users and who knows how many developers in their ecosystem?

Google, Microsoft, Apple . . they all do live events don't they?

When will it just run in the background, so it'll tell me when I happen to be within 400 yards of a friend in NYC? Now that would be cool.

I upvoted you because I agree and disagree. I agree because it would be totally cool if we both wanted that. It would be totally annoying if one of us actually wished to be private at that moment, or was in a rush, etc, and just forgot to turn off facebook.

I totally see why this is a fear. But actually I don't see a feature like this causing these kind of problems. How is it any different than receiving a text when you are busy or running into someone you know when you don't have time to chat. Everyone has times when they are busy and everyone has times when they aren't busy and want to be social.

I guess it's just like bumping into someone that you know when you don't have time to chat - but with a 50-fold increase in the radius of my personal sphere. I'd definitely give it a shot, at least, to see if I liked it.

My phone is going to need a 'private' toggle just like it has a 'silent mode' toggle - right on the home screen, or physical.

You could write a mobile Facebook app to take the stress out of restraining orders...

Google Latitude can do that. But that would mean you and your friend would have to use be using it, and the chances of that approach zero.

(There's a joke there about how the chances of you having an actual friend in NYC approach zero too, but I'm going to leave that one..)

loopt does that

http://www.loopt.com/

Is it possible that check-ins are just a fad? Can you imagine doing check-ins for the next 10 years, or for the next 30 years?

I think in their current form (game-ish) they are.

But attaching useful information to real life, that's not, it's just one of the sides of a future internet of things, and I believe that is where we are headed.

Sure - I think Twitter annotations might see some innovative uses in the future. Just not sure if we need an extra app+hype for every category of likeable things.

In fact, why not give everything a URL and be done with it (then the like button would suffice). Maybe that is what is really happening and 4sq et al are just domain grabbing schemes.

The real value of checkins is location based marketing initiatives. This service is an example providing real long term value based on where you are: http://www.shopkick.com/

That's value to the businesses, not the users, though?

I don't think businesses are craving for a way to give you stuff cheaper. They just want to tie you to their business. Is that really an advantage for the shopper?

Kudos to them. This feature was just a matter of time.

In addition to the growing popularity of 4square-like services, exchanging contact info w/new people at events & places has become less "What's your number?" to "Are you on Facebook?". This feature will make that sort of interaction much easier.

Bye bye FourSquare...

they partnered with FourSquare/GoWalla, actually. there will be a full read/write API. read is open today, write is in closed beta.

All these two companies have going for them now are stamps and badges...

And ironically, that's why most people use them . . .

I don't think that's irony :(

I dunno, I certainly never expected that people would want to play their lives as an MMO. :)

Seems there is a market for such a thing. EpicWin is an RPG to-do list application for the iPhone. http://www.epicwinapp.com

I take it you didn't see Chris Hecker's GDC talk? It was all about the real world gaining these MMO like rewards. It was fascinating and horrifying at the same time, but I'm hoping it will never be a reality.

www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27646/GDC_Heckers_Nightmare_Scenario__A_Future_Of_Rewarding_Players_For_Dull_Tasks.php

Once FB has their or enough data why can't they just add those features?

What's the history for Facebook squashing competition?

MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5, Bebo. I'm sure there are others that I'm missing.

They have played pretty hard in the virtual currency area too (although if anyone really thought they'd be able to build a business in that area on Facebook then I've got a bridge to sell you)

Depends if you think Foursquare is more like Zynga or FriendFeed.

Facebook can help some apps, but crushes others. I don't think it's at all clear which this will be.

I'm not so sure they're going to crush 4Square or Gowalla. Facebook is for wasting time -- idle messaging, playing Farmville. Mobile checkin apps are sort of the opposite of that. I don't doubt that 4Square users will connect to FB and start publishing their data (and if they decide to do that instead of polluting Twitter with it, awesome), but who is the target audience for pulling out the FB app on iPhone/Android and checking in somewhere?

I disagree. I see a ton of status updates from mobile devices by non-tech friends, and hardly any of those friends use 4s or Gowalla.

Great, now except quizzes and quotes and YouTube videos posted on my "News Feed", I'll have check-ins too!

Okay, maybe that was little ironic. Glad to see Facebook advancing on other fields too, and as for those check-ins on my feed, I'll click hide on those people who check-in every 15 minutes :)

And glad to see that they aren't kicking out the competition, but partnering with them!

Geo has so much potential and it looks like Facebook is working super hard to integrate this in a useful way. Checking in just to say "I'm at X" is just not interesting. Making location a part of a story (party, vacation, location where picture was taken...) is much more interesting and I can see it work out great if they find out how to tackle that. Their approach is very good, IMHO.

That being said, it seems like Facebook is building a record of me without me knowing, that I have no insight in. Friends tag me in pictures and tag my location now, too. That information is shown to various circles of friends. Now I'm not sure who knows what about me know since I neither created the information, nor had any part in sharing it. I suppose this reflects the real world in some way (people can talk about you whenever they want), it's just amplified in a major way.

Very interesting and intriguing indeed.

I'm beginning to think that this is what Lanier's "digital maoists" are all about.

I'm still wondering how all of this location based talk even arose between Gowalla and FourSquare...I feel bad for BrightKite, which was around at least a year before these two.

Doesn't show up for me. Not on touch site and not on the iphone app either. Anyone else having this issue?

I'm thinking it's because until recently I had my account set to a different language (I've been late to receive updates because of this before), but I am acatually in the US.

Not at 100% of US immediately

Doesn't say that anywhere--just says "Places is only available in the United States right now"

EDIT: TC has updates from fb on it: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/18/facebook-places-iphone-2/

It's not showing up in the "Updates" section of the App Store yet, but if you go to the Facebook page in the App Store you can install the update. The Places feature seems to be "unavailable" for a lot of people right now though as they roll it out on the backend.

It would be nice if the write API was available, but at least we'll be able to get the read-only stuff into Locurious before the next update goes out :)

Here's the blogpost from fcbk:

http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/403

No mention of Loopt?

Great, another way for creepy Facebook to know more about me!

I think Facebook has jumped the shark. I have a couple of hundred contacts on FB, and the activity levels are way low compared to what they used to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com