Facebook Places

» see facebook.com/places as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Facebook announced Places on August 18 2010 at a press event in Palo Alto. It was a check-in feature: open the Facebook app on an iPhone, press a button, and tell everyone which bar or which airport you were standing in. The launch was United States only, running on version 3.2 of the iPhone app and on touch.facebook.com for other phones that could report a location. Foursquare and Gowalla had spent two years building the category, and Facebook shipped its version to five hundred million people in one afternoon.

The privacy complaints arrived within days. Places carried a feature called Here Now that listed everyone currently checked in at a venue, and by default a friend could check you in to a place whether or not you had asked to be there. The permission was on unless you went and turned it off. That combination of a public location log and an opt-out nobody knew about produced the first sustained press cycle against the product, less than a week after launch.

Facebook Deals followed in November 2010, attaching coupons to check-ins so a business could reward the people who announced themselves. Neither half worked. Deals never got merchant density and Places never got the habit. On August 23 2011 Facebook announced that the Places tab was going away and that location would become a tag you attached to a status update or a photo, the same way you tagged a person. Deals was shut down three days later.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Check-in culture was an American thing that never crossed into my part of the internet. In 2010 i was 26 and in Ankara, and Facebook in Turkey was for photo albums and wall posts, not for broadcasting which cafe you were sitting in. Foursquare had a following among Turkish tech people who liked collecting the badges, but the habit stayed inside that circle. Places arrived as a tab i noticed once and never opened again.

The wider problem was that a check-in only means anything if the people you care about are checking in too. Foursquare had built that density in a handful of American cities over two years of unglamorous work. Facebook could ship the feature to everyone at once and still not manufacture a reason to press the button.

~ the unraveling ~

By mid-2011 the internal read at Facebook was that check-ins were a behavior for a narrow slice of users and that location worked better as metadata than as a destination. Places had its own tab and its own mental model, which meant it competed with the news feed for attention instead of feeding it. Turning location into a tag fixed that. Every photo and every status could now carry a place without anyone visiting a separate part of the app.

Foursquare did not die on schedule. Two months before Facebook retired Places, Foursquare raised at a valuation around six hundred million dollars. The company that was supposed to be crushed outlived the thing built to crush it by more than a decade.

~ the day it died ~

The August 23 2011 announcement was low key, delivered as a product update about location tagging rather than as a shutdown. Places lost its tab and its check-in button that day and survived only as a field inside the post composer, which is where it still sits. Most people never registered that anything had been killed. Facebook Deals got a separate notice on August 26 2011 and closed within the week.

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