Facebook Places | Complete Review on facebook Places | Checks In to the World of Locations

The 800-pound gorilla of social networks, Facebook, is jumping into the location game.

On Wednesday, it announced a new, optional service for its 500 million members called Places, which allows you to check in to various places you go, and share that information with your Facebook friends, complete with maps and comments and the Facebook thumbs-up “like” feature.

One reason Facebook has launched Places, surely, is to compete with location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Those services already can link up with Facebook and tap its huge member base, a potential threat to the larger social network.

Facebook says it is adding Places merely to enrich the social experience it already provides. The company says its users already post status messages that say things like: “at Starbucks in Harvard Square with Susan and Jeff.” Now, they can tap a new Places icon in the Facebook app on their iPhones and do this more easily, complete with a map. “We’re just building a new way for people to share that information in an engaging way,” says one Facebook official.

Facebook says it isn’t monetizing the service, at least not at first, but may consider ways for companies to make use of the data “down the line.”

Users won’t receive ads or offers, at least initially. But if a merchant already has a Facebook page, some will be able to display your check-ins from the start, though visible only to your friends. Facebook says it has no plans to add game-like features to Places, though third-party developers might.

In addition to testing Places around town, I paid close attention to its privacy features, to judge how much control Facebook is offering users over who gets to see where they are. My conclusion is that the controls are decent, but could be a bit better. You can control how public your Places information is on Facebook’s privacy settings screen, in the Sharing section. The default for Places is “Friends Only,” unless you expressed a preference to share things with everyone. That’s a good thing, in my view. You can change this to broaden it to, say, friends of friends, or even everyone. Or, you can limit it, so that, for instance, only certain people can see your location, or certain people can’t.

Facebook also allows you to bar others from checking you in, and lets you hide yourself from others’ “Here Now” listings, though you can’t customize this latter setting by, say, allowing only some people to know you’re nearby.

In my tests, these settings worked fine. But I wished a couple of other settings were available. For example, you can’t keep check-in notices off your Facebook page, unless you broadly block other kinds of status updates. And you can’t block merchants from including your check-ins at their establishments on their Facebook pages. Also, while Places omits some annoying aspects of its competitors, like the game features, it’s more stripped down and leaves out some attractive features others include. Foursquare has a feature that lets you leave suggestions about a location. And Gowalla has a “trips” feature that lets users string together places they’ve been into recommended tours.

Overall, I found Places a good enhancement to Facebook and one that will likely make the booming social network even more attractive to some.

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