Facebook Places Signals a Tipping Point for Location Services

Yesterday afternoon brought the official announcement of Facebook Places, the giant network’s entry into geolocation services that had been rumored for months.

We’ve been bullish on location for a couple years (whatever happened to Fire Eagle), so this announcement is huge, even though I rarely use Facebook anymore and don’t plan to use Facebook Places.

Why?

Because, as with social networking, status publishing, social gaming, photo sharing and a host of other services, Facebook has become the place where the bell curve gets acquainted with new stuff. As people use X on Facebook, they become familiar and comfortable (or not) with X, and they begin to understand the value of X.

Where X is aforementioned new stuff.

This helps us immensely because it provides context when we start talking about X. Location services have huge value within the enterprise, and Facebook Places will only help us make the use cases more obvious.

Plus, Facebook Places will help iron out the lingering questions about location, e.g. will anyone use it, is it a security nightmare, where’s the value beyond personal meetups with friends, etc.

Foursquare has made significant inroads lately with location and brand/business tie-ins, and Facebook is pushing in this direction from the get-go. There’s a lot of money to be made rewarding the loyalty of customers, and Places is a natural extension of the overall Facebook presence that (it seems like) every business has now.

Am I alone in feeling like it’s AOL all over again when businesses advertise their website and their Facebook page with equal prominence? So don’t even bother with their websites anymore.

Why?

Because they know exactly who you are when you land on a Facebook page. Now, they could also know how often you’ve patronized their establishment. This is gold for advertisers.

And potentially lead for users, or not, depending on what the rewards are.

Anyway, I’m very interested to watch Facebook Places evolve. It’s not available everywhere yet, so we’ll have to wait a bit. An interesting tidbit from yesterday’s announcement was that 20% of foursquare’s users push their data to Facebook. That’s pretty astounding to me, even given the relatively small user base of foursquare.

Imagine if 20% of Facebook’s 500 million users eventually use Facebook Places.

Find the comments, this stuff is interesting to me, especially the naysaying.