Location, Location, Location ummm…. Places, Places, Places

Places on iPhone Facebook has just announced their long awaited location-based feature that they’ve called Places. Places is currently available from the Facebook iPhone app, or from http://touch.facebook.com/ if your mobile device supports HTML 5 and geolocation.

Places seems to be all about “Checking In” to places, a’ la Foursquare, although Places doesn’t seem to have the concept of “mayor” yet. In fact, it really isn’t so clear what the relationship of Places to similar services like Foursquare or Gowalla even is. On the surface, they’d seem to be rivals, but representatives from these other companies were on stage at the launch event. Everyone seems to be scratching their heads and asking “Why?”. Inside Facebook seems to think that everyone will play well together. On the other hand, All Facebook seems to think that Facebook is simply playing the proverbial cat that toys with the mouse before eating it. We seem to agree – Facebook is several orders of magnitude bigger than Foursquare and really doesn’t need them. Bye…

In other relationship news, Facebook has chosen to use Bing Maps instead of Google maps for well, mapping. Not a big surprise here, Facebook’s relationship with Microsoft > Facebook’s relationship with Google.

Facebook also seems to be making a big deal about privacy for Places. As if we’re all worried about Facebook’s use of our private data … There are also some safeguards to protect you from your friends playing pranks by checking you into the local strip joint, the free clinic, or Country Kitchen Buffet.

The name that Facebook chose for this service is also very interesting. Places vs. Locations. When you think about it, it makes sense based on the service that Facebook is providing. This service uses places (Katz’s Deli) as their atomically addressable entity as opposed to location (40° 43′ 20.33″ N, 73° 59′ 14.41″ W) which is far more precise, but amorphous. Facebook is clearly shooting at getting people to check in and tag real places to help fill up their Open Graph. This choice also seems to encourage developers to build location-aware applications around places and friends (since that’s what Facebook is all about) rather than real-time precise locations that one would need for say a citywide gaming application.

Which brings us to developers, APIs, and testing, the Raison d’être of this blog. Facebook is exposing user’s checkins to applications that use the Graph API (sorry Classic RESTful API developers – time to change). Currently, the only thing applications can get is checkin info using one of the following APIs:

GET https://graph.facebook.com/[checkin_id]

Gives information about an individual checkin

GET https://graph.facebook.com/[place/Page/user_id]/checkins

Gives a list of checkins that this entity has made. BTW, why can a place perform a checkin??

GET https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=checkin&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN

Seaches for checkins

We’re told that an API to create checkin information from an application is on its way, or actually is in Double Secret Beta. Look for it soon, and then things will begin to get really interesting.