Are location-based mobile services going Places because of Facebook’s new feature?
It’s been available for less than a month, but Facebook Places — which lets you share your physical location online — appears to have put trendy location-based services and check-in apps on the map, industry analysts say.
With Facebook’s 500 million members as its potential audience, Places could entice smartphone-wielding consumers, many of whom are unfamiliar with check-in apps, to use such services to connect with friends face-to-face, find discounts on the move and get neighborhood news. Facebook has not disclosed user data, but tech industry investors and analysts say the new app could be a catalyst as businesses look to cash in on the use of social media by a growing mobile audience.
Indeed, location services may prove to be the most “social” of social-networking services, says Sam Altman, CEO of leading vendor Loopt.
For now, Facebook says it isn’t monetizing Places, which lets you “check in” and provides information about millions of businesses via an iPhone app or a Web site (touch.facebook.com). Search heavyweight Google also has its eye on location services. In April it unveiled Google Places, a database of Web pages for more than 50 million places optimized for mobile phones. The service, which doesn’t have a check-in component but lists everything from store hours to customer reviews, originally launched as Google Local Business Center in 2005.
A Facebook Phone?
As competition intensifies, the allure of mobile riches even has Facebook exploring the idea of producing a mobile phone, according to published reports over the weekend.
Facebook denied the story, by blog TechCrunch, but would not say if it is considering marketing a Facebook-branded phone made by a third-party hardware company that would integrate Facebook’s features.
“Facebook is not building a phone,” company spokeswoman Meredith Chin says. “Our approach has always been to…