Facebook Launched Places to Bore Me Silly

Posted by schneidermike on Monday, August 23, 2010 · View Comments 

Most people who write software start by defining a problem to solve. They try to make the world a simpler and more efficient place through lines of code. I am not convinced that Facebook thinks that way. Mark Zuckerberg has once again gone against the grain and proven that Facebook is writing software for their needs.

beautiful-katamari-2

Who is Places for? As of this post (see what I did there?) It isn’t feature rich enough to satisfy the nerds. There is no model to benefit a business and it does not offer anything to entice the marketers.

So what? The aforementioned audiences have (practically) been begging the LBS vendors for more options and more control. Analysts have been supposing what a Facebook LBS experience would be like, but instead of listening of listening and leapfrogging, Facebook has decided to start by releasing the minimum. The ability to check in and a Read API for application development. Aaron Strout and I had a talk about this on the Twitter. I am disappointed because for some reason I thought Facebook did not suffer from the same kind of tunnel vision that other giant organizations experience.

katamari_cousins

In my article about how LBS vendors needed to fear the sleeping giant, I gave Facebook way too much credit. I assumed that Facebook would actually look at the market and go live with:

  • A clear statement of how to validate that business belongs to the person who claims the business.
  • A listing of the services accessible to businesses and marketers complete with a self service model.
  • A clear understanding of the activation model including costs and the associated time frames.

I even said: “Facebook will treat this like a revenue stream. Their LBS version 1 will go online with a method of business activation, tiered levels of service and a pricing model”. And why not? They have the resources available to build this functionality into their already massive platform. Instead Zuckerberg’s team has proven that they live in oblivion. There is almost got a Katanari Damacy fun-yet-near-pointless premise in play. Zuckerberg is the King of All Cosmos whose whimsy led to the destruction of the universe. We are the princes and princesses who are employed but the king to roll our katamaris through Farmville and Yoville. We are collecting pictures and videos of people, beer, cows and candy at various places reforming a giant Facebook eternity of whatever.

Katamari_Prince

They are clearly employing a strategy to test whether the masses will play. And they are once again flipping the bird to privacy by allowing a user to check any friend in their social graph into a Place regardless of whether they are actually there. For example, I checked a bunch of people into my local Starbucks this morning. None of them were even in my state (but it would have been a really great group).

Instead of innovation, we got a disjointed experience. A check in is just a check in. We currently cannot associate anything (media) but other people to the place. There is no game, no campaign and no surprise and delight. At least we got the power to compromise the privacy of our friends.

Katamari_cousin_Kuro1

I am going to my happy place now. “It’s free software. It’s free software. It’s free software. It’s free software. It’s free software. It’s free software.”

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  • meghanmbiro
    Hello Mike. Enjoyed this interesting update re Facebook Places, LBS innovation, and strategy. All valid thoughts here. Audience is one key word. There is no doubt we continue to experience a volume + traffic game unfolding. I concur that Facebook has been surprisingly slow to innovate given their current market share aka: plethora of eyeballs. Perhaps I am the only one not yet checking in regularly? :-) Will keep you all posted. Time will tell...
  • So, what we really got is a meta layer on Facebook that will be powerful. I am fine with that. Facebook consistently innovates, but they do it surprisingly slow. There have been few examples of them jumping ahead of the curve and innovating beyond the launch of the initial platform. And even Facebook itself was a cleaner, more targeted Myspace.

    Photos was not innovative beyond tagging. Their video is not innovative. Their real time stream was not new either.

    What they have is an audience. What they have added is really important data underneath it all. They are in it for the long haul. They are happy to let Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp innovate, while they wait for the big ad dollars that will ultimately roll in to their existing deals and larger audience.
  • I agree Jason. The check-in is another way for Facebook to collect data from their existing users and via the API from partnering with other location-based applications.
  • There was one thing that FB was thinking when the launched Places -- cash. It's a data raking tool that they'll use to sell to dumb-ass companies who think that FB is going to help them sell a zillion widgets. Sheep I say...they're all sheep...and we are right there with them as we all checkin. :)
  • Mike,
    I agree that this seems like a missed opportunity. But I noticed a really interesting thing happen over the weekend. Those who never showed an interest in FourSquare, GoWalla etc were now willing to try out Facebook Places. Will it be a fad like the Stroutmeister indicated? Maybe. But it could also be the gateway drug to a more mainstream adoption of LBS benefits.

    One other thought. As I was reading this post I couldnt help but think you could have written the same post about big potential, unlimited power, and missed opportunities last year with Google Wave.

  • Long live Google Wave.. wait that's another post. Greg, same here. I'm seeing a few friends who never used Foursquare or other LBS use places.
  • aaronstrout
    Mike - great post as always and thanks for the shout out. To be honest, I'd normally agree with you when it comes to Facebook i.e. they tend not to be super innovative (owning 500 million eyeballs will do that to you). In this particular case, I believe that one of two things are at play. 1) Facebook is working hard not to scare off/disintermediate other LBS players. As I posited in my recent post on Places, I am now of the mindset that FB is wanting to be an infrastructure layers/database for location-based services. This will allow other LBS players like FourSquare, Whrrl and Gowalla to focus on innovation and gaming. 2) it was announced on Friday that Facebook had purchased LBS player, Hot Potato. I'm not sure what this means but that may have major implications on FB's longer term LBS strategy.

    One additional thought... I have seen a lot of friends checking in on Places that I hadn't seen on FourSquare or Gowalla. For many, this likely will be a fad but adding a feature to an app/site that they are used to using makes adoption 100% more likely than asking them to remember to find/download/use a foreign app on a network where they may have few/no friends. For this reason, I'm of the mindset that simpler was better.

    The good news is that we'll get to chat/debate this live over the next two months at the Location Based Marketing Conferencing in late September (NYC), GeoM (Boston) in early October and BlogWorld Expo (Las Vegas) in mid-October.
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