Facebook’s announcement last week that it plans to drag its 500 million users into the location-sharing craze raises an important question: Why in the name of Ferdinand Magellan would anyone want to do such a thing?
For the past two years, I’ve experimented with various services that allow you to “check in” and share your location with friends and social networks. Among the early adopter crowd, this is considered The Next Really Big Thing. In certain circles, it seems like everyone is spending their whole day checking in everywhere.
But it’s mostly been a fringe phenomenon, with less than 4 percent of adults trying it, according to Forrester Research. However, Facebook’s launch of its new Places service could give a major shot of adrenaline to the practice of checking in. It will take time before we know for sure, because Facebook is rolling the service out slowly. For now, it’s only going to be available to iPhone users and people with smart phones that have the most advanced browsers.
Owners of Android and BlackBerry phones are out of luck for the moment. Facebook said it will eventually create new apps for those phones, but didn’t say when.
Facebook’s move into this space also raises the question of whether it will squash all the other companies that provide various check-in services. Many of them were gamely on stage at the Facebook announcement, trying to put a brave face on a development that could in fact deliver a death blow to many of them. But there are plenty of things these services offer that Facebook doesn’t, so perhaps some of them will survive.
If you’re among the uninitiated, “checking in” works like this: You arrive at some place and take out your smart phone. You launch the app of one of the check-in services, which tries to…