Facebook Just Bowed Out of the Check In War With Foursquare
betabeat.com
betabeat.com
It's a bit like saying: "Oh, by the way. I might be hanging out down at the bar tonight. Swing by if you feel like it". Without actually having to say it out loud.
edit: The more I think about this, the more angry I get. It feels like the Google+ nerd mafia is slowly destroying Facebook through bad influence. They simply don't understand how and why Facebook works and is popular. The whole privacy and circles stuff for example, which is just stupid. No normal person cares about that. Facebook is a tool for sharing and connecting and to limit that in the name of privacy is insanely counterproductive. It only adds a wet blanket of politics on something that is better understood through social psychology and sociology. Facebook used to understand that, but now it seems they've started to become distracted. Sad really.
The somewhat technical explanation is that what Google is doing is implementing something very similar to "Social role theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_Theory), which emphasizes social roles as the defining characteristic used to understand social interaction. While Facebook rather is implementing something more akin to "Symbolic interaction theory" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interaction).
I think it's pretty obvious that Facebook has been, from the start, something very different. It is so ingrained in every little design decision and how they promote and talk about the service that it is a tool for managing your public persona. Not a simple communication tool, or replacement for email. Though they obviously offer that kind of functionality as well through Messages and Chat.
Facebook wants to enhance or maybe even change the way you interact socially. It's not a political agenda, but it is definitly a very conscious mission to change a large part of western culture.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about this. So let me state it again to make it clear:
FACEBOOK IS A TOOL FOR MANAGING YOUR PUBLIC PERSONA.
You are profoundly fooling yourself if you think that most Facebook users aren't using it as a way to CC a list of people some photos. I don't know anyone outside of the tech/blog scene who uses Facebook to manage a public persona. It's just a different way to communicate with people.
FACEBOOK IS A TOOL TO MAKE YOU (the user, their product) MORE MARKETABLE TO ADVERTISERS (the customers).
By knowing everything about you, they can get better rates from advertisers. Everything else, like photo sharing, and the ability to send messages to other people, or check into place, is designed to get more info about you, and to make sure you don't wander off Facebook to their competitors (if you didn't have picture sharing, you'd be using Picasa or Flicker more -- and that might threaten facebook).
I'm not saying plus will win the social wars because Facebook has a lot of people because it built up a lot of momentum. But if it looses it won't be because people found it too nerdy / geeky or whatever. It just means Facebook had a huge advantage and they didn't let it slip.
Except for the massive issues surrounding name use and the triviality in which it can be used to grief other people and not just on Google+ but their entire google account.
No tips, no explore, No trending, No badges (worthless, but fun), and less specials than Foursquare.
To be fair, I have many friends who use Foursquare for its most obvious and intended purpose, which is to arrange spontaneous meetups without having to text all their friends where they are or to find out where everybody is going. I do it myself, I just pop open 4sq on the phone and see "oh, everybody is at Foo's Bar" and then go there. Easy. Facebook Places makes that simple action incredibly difficult and slow.
Places essentially fails as well because it broadens the userbase too much. My college friends whom I no longer live near couldn't care less what bar I'm at. My local friends who I'm friends with on 4sq do care. So there's a natural separation. I'm only 4sq friends with people I'm likely to see often. I'm Facebook friends with almost everybody I've ever known.
Location as meta is a good thing for Facebook. Location as check-in doesn't fit with Facebook's friend model.
You can also now do this from your computer (not just your smartphone), and do it just before you go to, or just after you return from your venue, not just while you're there.
The jury is still out on the new privacy stuff though.
Although I think google+ is a welcome player on the market what really frustrates me is that I am forced to add people to some circle.
Why forced?
The same reason LinkedIn "Completion Bar" is effective.
It taxes on your cognitive energy to see people not applied to a specific circle.
Twitters work much better where people just can follow me.
The functionality that foursquare (and apps utilizing foursquare's API) offer are still possible, perhaps even easier.
Facebook is still going to win this part of the "war".
I presume Facebook found that the people who used check-ins was a subset of the people that used tagging functionality, so they scrapped the check-in model and focused on making location accessible in a format that a) more people are comfortable with and b) is consistent with the rest of the Facebook experience.
For example, at a conference like SXSW, you have x-thousand attendees with their smart phones. You can track where they all go for the whole event. But the number of people who would find that data useful (by my way of thinking at least) is quite small - the local vendors, the other attendees (who won't pay a dime for the service), who else?
How do you sell it to them and how much can you get? How do you monetize that in a way that isn't just glorified banner ads to a small market segment? How do you make it HUGE? That's where I have trouble.
http://www.businessinsider.com/foursquare-facebook-2011-8
MG Siegler Confirms - http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/facebook-location-tagging/
I always thought it would be far more useful to build these services out as a way to allow people to quickly find each other in one-to-one, as opposed to unsolicited one-to-many, updates. For example, I think a more common use case would be to pull out a phone and alongside a contact have a single button to query for location, then on the other end have the user just as easily transmit his or her location. That would fix the privacy concerns as well.
In fact, checking in will still be around, and location info will be able to be attached to -any- content on FB.
They are now getting rid of Places. From the Foursquare blog post:
"As a part of this, we are phasing out the mobile-only Places feature. Settings associated with it are also being phased out or removed. (You can read more about how location works and settings affected here: http://www.facebook.com/about/location)
Yes, location will still be part of Facebook, as noted by Betabeat. But it will not be executed with the "check-in" model foursquare pioneered. The new way will be closer to tagging a user in a Google+ conversation.
Incorporating location-tagging directly into the status update UI (and extending the ability to tag a location to photos and videos), does not mean Facebook is bowing out of any "war"... It means they are honing in on the right location feature set for their userbase, rather than simply copying Foursquare.
I predict location-tagging of status updates and content will gain massive adoption within Facebook and quickly dwarf Facebook Check-In, which by the way, is staying part of Facebook's mobile apps (at least for now).