September 17, 2010
Facebook Places launches in more countries
Bulgaria, Brazil, India, Egypt, South Africa, the Philippines and Israel all get location check-ins
Facebook Places is now available in more countries, including Bulgaria, Brazil, India, Egypt, South Africa, the Philippines and Israel, according to user reports.
We’ve contacted Facebook to verify that Places has been extended to these locations, but have not yet received reply.
The in-house service for checking into venues and businesses in the real world, Facebook Places first started rolling out only to U.S. users in mid-August 2010. Barely a month after that, the service launched in Japan, followed by a UK launch a few days after that. Since then, it’s been a sporadic, mostly unannounced rollout for the rest of the world.
While Facebook maintains a press page for statistics ranging from number of active users to number of translations to mobile usage, there’s absolutely nothing listed about location. A few months ago, I figured it was because the actual stats were not as impressive as the company would’ve liked to admit, but by now there should certainly be some notable traction.
Since August, when Places first launched, location has become increasingly important, especially as daily deals site Groupon has helped shine the spotlight on local deals as a powerful source of marketing for businesses and revenue for Web services. Facebook itself is in the midst of launching its own deals program, following the initial launch for mobile users in November.
As for a couple of the other popular location services, Google said in December that nine million people use Latitude on mobile devices and Foursquare recently reached 7.5 million users. One would think that, with 200 million users on mobile devices around the world, Facebook Places could blow the two away, but we’ve heard nothing yet.
We’ve contacted Facebook to verify that Places has been extended to these locations, but have not yet received reply.
The in-house service for checking into venues and businesses in the real world, Facebook Places first started rolling out only to U.S. users in mid-August 2010. Barely a month after that, the service launched in Japan, followed by a UK launch a few days after that. Since then, it’s been a sporadic, mostly unannounced rollout for the rest of the world.
While Facebook maintains a press page for statistics ranging from number of active users to number of translations to mobile usage, there’s absolutely nothing listed about location. A few months ago, I figured it was because the actual stats were not as impressive as the company would’ve liked to admit, but by now there should certainly be some notable traction.
Since August, when Places first launched, location has become increasingly important, especially as daily deals site Groupon has helped shine the spotlight on local deals as a powerful source of marketing for businesses and revenue for Web services. Facebook itself is in the midst of launching its own deals program, following the initial launch for mobile users in November.
As for a couple of the other popular location services, Google said in December that nine million people use Latitude on mobile devices and Foursquare recently reached 7.5 million users. One would think that, with 200 million users on mobile devices around the world, Facebook Places could blow the two away, but we’ve heard nothing yet.
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