Facebook tonight presented its long-awaited Facebook Places product to a large gathering of press at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. office. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the company had been working on the product for “a little bit more than a few months.” The product has three goals, he said:
- Helping people share where they are
- Helping users see who’s around them
- Helping users see what’s going on and discover new places
Places launches tonight on touch.facebook.com for “advanced mobile browsers”and on the company’s new iPhone app. “Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world; it’s about sharing where you are with your friends,” said Places product manager Michael Sharon. Sharon showed off Place pages that display recent activity from friends and other people who have checked in. Check-ins show up as status messages with a little pin logo similar to those seen on Google Maps, and are published to friends’ walls if they are tagged.
As for privacy, users are allowed to disable location tagging completely, and the default for location check-ins is friends only. You can only tag your friends, and you’re notified as soon as you’re tagged.
We’ll keep this post updated with a news summary as the event continues.
