I've been saying it for months, but Social Check-in will be owned by Facebook and Google. Startups that didn't take M&A offers from them are completely deluded. This is not a "we could be the next Twitter" scenario. Now that I've seen Facebook Places in action, I believe that even more
I finally managed to get Places working by saying I was in Palo Alto and connecting to http://touch.facebook.com on my Android phone over a U.S. VPN (or maybe someone in Facebook was just very nice to me 
). I created the LouderVoice "spot" and then checked in. It used the location feature of HTML5 in the browser to figure out where I was. Trivial to do and fully integrated into my normal day to day Facebook usage.
). I created the LouderVoice "spot" and then checked in. It used the location feature of HTML5 in the browser to figure out where I was. Trivial to do and fully integrated into my normal day to day Facebook usage. No more "close Facebook, open Foursquare, check-in, close Foursquare, open Facebook".
Just Facebook.
Our Places page looks like the attached picture. and the only glitch I've noticed is that the "Is this your business" feature (see AllFacebook.com for more details) is not there. I wonder is this because we are outside of the U.S. and they don't actually have address/contact info for us, just GPS co-ordinates?
More updates as I explore.
One big hole I have encountered with Places is the complete lack of search. I’ve been trying and failing to find other example Places pages but since only two people I’m connected to on Facebook are using it, my sample set is tiny. Anyone got any example URLs they could share with me?
What I don’t see Facebook doing well is recommendations and analysis of those check-ins. It will capture the check-in easily enough and then, I imagine, leave analysis up to 3rd party applications (like FourSquare.) So FourSquare can focus on analysis and move on from simple check-ins.
That’ll be interesting to watch alright. The whole recommendation area is still wide-open but very hard to do well.