Jun 10
1
About a month ago, Techcrunch announced that Facebook would be rolling out location-based checkin functionality for their mobile app, and that it would most likely be dubbed the “Places” tab. Geo-location is all the rage now, with Foursquare nearing 1 million checkins a day and Gowalla at a quarter million users, and while it’s no surprise that Facebook is looking to jump on the bandwagon, it is surprising that they would dub their new checkin feature “Places…”
Enter Google Places allows business owners to list tons of information about their locations, offer discounts, display photos and videos, and offers analytics and insights all for free.
Why would Facebook choose to name their latest feature “Places,” the same name that their biggest share-of-web competitor, Google, has given to its local business search?
Possibly because they don’t have much of a plan going into anything (difficult when your leader has never run a business and is only 27) and they have the hubris to believe that they can be late to the game rolling out a feature that many other businesses are already implementing extremely successfully (being the biggest player in the game doesn’t mean you can get sloppy; look at AOL), and their short sightedness in making confusing changes for their users has been well documented (see: tons Privacy Changes and the new Like Button, among the most recent). As a matter of fact, “Places” would be the perfect name!
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