Facebook announced they are entering the geo-location race with the announcement of Facebook places. Sounds like big trouble for Foursquare, Gowalla, and Scvngr! Surprisingly it's quite the opposite Facebook has invited the competition in via the new Facebook Places API. The API will allow badges to be shared across all platforms.
Facebook appears to be giving the competition a leg up. However, a familiar story may unravel. Facebook is perfectly positioned to become the dominant platform. With more than 500 million members, clearly it would be an easy transition for check in novices.
Picture it: Brand new smart phone in hand, 300+ friends on Facebook, it would be the obvious choice for checking in.
It may become very hard for competitors to offer a significant value proposition to lure users away from Facebook Places. Unless of course arch enemy Google enters the fray. Will these two foes slug it out once more, or will a new champion be crowned?
What This Means For You
- with Ruud Hein
- Check ins to rapidly become a social norm. With Facebook at the helm, the number of players is endless. An advanced social media platform also increase user interaction, and competition.
- Facebook is re-enforcing every aspect of itself to be the de facto social network. (see also: Why Facebook Bought A Semantic Search Engine)
- Social marketing managers have to add Facebook to their geo-location driven campaigns.
- and if you dont have a geo-location driven campaign, now is a good time to do a PMI analysis to see if geo-location is in your interest.
I have never been a fan of Geo Targetting, but I will be interested to see how Facebook use this feature to their advantage.
Geo targeted ad’s? Tag yourself in a shopping center and then you get ads from surrounding stores? Facebook will try something to use even more of our personal information to advertise.
Gret point Dan. It is scary to think of the kind of targeted ads we will recieve going forward. The depth of information Facebook can access on our personal accounts!! The era of a drive through mall may be upon us. The stores will already know what we want…
I can picture it already…
“Sir, I see you checking in. Can I help you with anything?”
“Sorry, I’m actually just (web) browsing.” 🙂
Just downloaded it on my iPhone and love it! It looks like SCVNGR is SO much better than Foursquare mainly because of the game dynamics that they’ve that are part of it. Now they just need to accumulate their user base because not a single person I know is using it. 🙁 I’m guessing that Foursquare will simply add on some of the features that SCVNGR has in order to compete.