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Random thoughts on Facebook Places
As someone who has enjoyed and written about location-based services (LBS) since I first started using Foursquare and Gowalla at South by Southwest two years ago, and as a developer for a social app that uses the “check-in” concept, and as a close friend of someone who worked on it, I was anxiously awaiting the launch of Facebook’s “Places,” their take on the whole LBS thing.
Places went live in earnest today, and it’s rolling out slowly to Facebook users across the network. It’s available in the iPhone app and also on the touch version of Facebook’s website (tip: you may have to log out of and back into the iPhone app before the check-in functionality shows up for you).
This is a short list of random thoughts from my first impressions in playing with Facebook Places.
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Foursquare versus Gowalla, round two
A year ago, two exciting location-based social games launched at South By Southwest Interactive, the annual geek-fest that is something of a mecca for web nerds. After playing with both down in Austin, I wrote a blog post entitled A look at Foursquare and Gowalla. Although the post didn’t generate a ton of discussion, it is still consistently near the very top of my most-viewed-posts stats. A year ago, location-based social games were something of a novelty — now, they’re the hottest thing going.
So, I thought I’d post a follow-up, letting you know what’s changed, why these two games may not be as similar as you think, and which I personally prefer.
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A look at Foursquare and Gowalla
Two highly-anticipated, location-based, IRL-style “games” for iPhone were launched at South By Southwest Interactive this year, and I thought I’d take a few moments to report on my experiences with each one.
First up is Foursquare, a sequel of sorts to the popular Dodgeball mobile tool, which was purchased by Google a few years ago and then killed very recently. The second new iPhone game is Gowalla, and it comes from my good friends at Alamofire. The two have a lot in common, but as you might expect, it’s their differences that are interesting. Let’s get into it…
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.