Facebook introduced its new location based service Wednesday, officially entering the social networking giant into the location service game.
Facebook Places will allow you to check into the businesses and other locations that you go to on a daily basis. The only problem, they have a lot of competition.
Facebook has introduced Places, a location based service. Places will be available to the Facebook mobile apps and touch.facebook.com.
Location based service Foursquare has taken off in recent months and has a dedicated user base that might be hesitant to make the switch to Places, even though Foursquare is integrated with Places.
So will users want to switch to a different service? It’s a tough question to answer.
While Foursquare has a dedicated user base, Facebook has over 500 million active monthly users to tap into.
This leads to the question, why do people use location based services in the first place?
A big reason for using Foursquare are the little bonuses that come with checking in, badges, mayorships and specials.
Foursquare has done a great job virtually rewarding using their badges and mayorships as incentive for users to continue using the service.
Also, businesses, including Starbucks, Whole Foods, Gap and several others, have caught onto the Foursquare specials for users that checkin regularly with their service.
Facebook Places, at least from the start, will offer none of that. That means no badges, no mayorships and no specials.
If not for these rewards, would people even be checking in to the venues they go to? I don’t think so.
In addition to that, will users that have not bothered to use Foursquare or other location based services want to start using Places simply because it’s there? I doubt it.
The early adopters and mainstream have already adopted Foursquare and while I feel some of them will start using Places as well, I can’t see a large amount of people using Places that haven’t already been using location services in the past.
This skepticism aside, I do think Places is a good service.
Integrated with Foursquare, as well as Gowalla, the other location based service that has been a distant second to Foursquare, Places will have a nice base of venues and users right off the bat. However, I don’t think it will be enough to over take a service such as Foursquare, as the incentives are just not there.
Facebook Places reminds me of Google Latitude, a service that had potential but just never really caught on.
While I could be wrong, I see Foursquare continuing to rein supreme in the location service game.
