Facebook launches Facebook Places with location sharing service features

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebooks’ venture into Location based services that are increasingly becoming popular globally as it allows businesses to target their regular customers. Facebook Places helps users with their iPhone smartphone to share details of their whereabouts instantly with their friends while on the move whether checking in at restaurants, bars, or other social venues.The user simply has to choose a place from the list and tap the "check in" button to check in, or tap the plus symbol to add a new place, and a security notice will be displayed explaining the user will be going to share their location. The service also includes the ability to tag friends who are in the same location and check them in at the same time.

 Places also include a feature that will allow users to report location listings that are erroneous, offensive, or outdated. This Facebook geo-location service emulates much of the functionality provided by existing services such as Foursquare and Yelp, albeit without gaming elements.

The user will get push notifications if friends are spotted nearby and be able to see who else is checked in with the user. Users will have the option to remove themselves from any tag, as with the existing photo sharing service. Additionally, users can choose to opt out of letting others tag them in Places. Checkins will also show up in the Facebook news feeds of friends. Facebook has hitherto makes "public" not only what is written in our profile, but also the whereabouts of user while writing it.

This app will once again raise the user’s online privacy that Facebook has been embroiled in recent months. Check-ins are visible to users who are on their friends list, although this can be customized to allow wider sharing or to restrict it down to just a chosen few people.

Facebook with 500 million user base will benefit from this new service as it can tap the local advertising market driven by small businesses like restaurants and stores.
Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and Brightkite are some of the players in this market and Facebook would be joining a growing wave of web services companies that affix locations to content posted by users. Twitter too launched their location based tweeting a couple of months back and Google also provides Latitude service using Google Maps for mobiles.

Facebook is making all the efforts to enhance the Facebook social graph by opening its Places through Graph API for all Facebook developers.This app will help Facebook development with richer and engaging social experience.