Facebook on Wednesday launched its Places app with version 3.2 for the iPhone. The new app is a direct response to Foursquare, created by Dennis Crowly in 2009. Once again Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, has thrust his weight in the social networking world and should only further increase Facebook’s market share in the geolocation social networking world. Foursquare’s decline and fall have been cemented.
Upon opening the Facebook app, Places is directly in the center. There is no where to hide from it. Facebook then asks to use your current location. This allows them to place you near where your friends are. Users can check in at different places, much like Foursquare, and their friends can see where they are. It is all very simple and easy to use.
However it appears that Places is not ready for full service. I personally used the app this morning to only receive a message of “This feature will be available in your region soon. Thank you for your patience.” Really? I felt somewhat disappointed to not be able to play with their newest creation, yet. I asked myself, “Why did they go ahead and launch the app? It’s not working.” Facebook will work out these problems soon enough.
Security is always a growing concern for the ever growing Facebook. It has already received a torrid of reports of people’s lives being ruined because of something on the site. The iPhone could become nothing more than a tracking devise for marketing frims, intelligence agencies, parents of teens, and stalkers. That is not something a sixteen-year-old constantly wants. How are they supposed to run off and be kids when they have a tracking devise in their pocket?
In addition to Facebook’s response to Foursquare, they have also added new privacy settings for status updates. Users are now able to set who sees what individual status. This has never been an option before. Mostly people could simply change their public information while sacrificing being able to update their status. Or, they simply could defriend people they did not want to share their status with.
Threaded messages, or messages to multiple people, now display all of those in the message not just the sender. A subtle change nonetheless.
Also, for those with the new iPhone or with the iOS 4, multimedia may be uploaded in the background of the iPhone. This makes a drastic change from the old. No longer will there be a delay in being able to use the iPhone or Facebook. That is a very handy tool Facebook has added.
For Zuckerberg, this is just another example of how Facebook remains the king of social networking.
