Facebook Places - has the time for geolocation apps arrived?

[Alice Will]

Although us in Europe haven't been privileged with the advent of Facebook Places yet, I can't explain how extremely excited I am about this new service. I have closely followed the growth and development of foursquare and understand the value of it as a marketing and engagement tool for brands, but have yet to really feel it is really worth investment. Until it has a larger user-base, I don't quite feel I can recommend it to our clients as a key social media channel to invest in, yet.

But now the king of social networks is adopting location-based services, I am anticipating a massive surge in interest in this very very interesting new venture for Facebook. It was inevitable that they would introduce a geolocation platform, but the intriguing thing will be to see what impact this will have on social commerce. Will more brands start adopting the use of foursquare? Will users become more familiar with the concept of shopping via Facebook? I think it will take the concept of foursquare to a level that it would never be able to manage, and brands will have the benefit of being able to create dynamic, targeted, ads in a way that was never possible before - and I don't mean little banner ads. Think virtual goods, wall comments, videos, photographs and social games.

I am interested to hear what other members think the impact of Facebook Places will be...let's get the discussion going!

[Richard Kelly]

I reckon people wil be pretty reluctant to share their location. Even a lot of the tech savvy folk I follow on Twitter are pretty vocal about "BoreSquare" and I think the larger public will either a) not care too much or b) find it too big a privacy issue. But still, even if only 10% of facebook users adopt it it would still have roughly 14 times more users than 4sq!

Hard to say how nice/useful it is just now with no friends using it, but did manage to add my agency this morning and I did enjoy the much-talked about facility to check in others.