Thoughts on Facebook Places
It means a lot to me that companies like Foursquare and Gowalla (and of course Snapr!) will continue to thrive following Facebook’s entry to the LBS marketplace.
No one wants to see a web where the only viable option for a start-up is to do something interesting enough to be bought and assimilated by Facebook or Google.
For some people that’s always going to be a good exit option, but things will get very boring if it seems impossible to break through with a new company.
Facebook looks headed towards being so huge that it is big on the same scale that the internet is big..
Rather than just being a destination site it wants to become an omnipresent socially organized tunnel through which we experience and share the internet.
Sounds scary when you put it like that, but really its not much more scary than Google has ever been (starting to get scarier.. thanks for sticking to your guns on net neutrality guys..).
The thing about being that big is that it gets hard to deliver a good experience around any single thing to anyone in particular.
Denis Crowley was right when (if) he said that Facebook’s places option was boring. It has to be boring because EVERYONE is on Facebook - mum, dad, granddad, the kids, all 500 million of them. And all these people don’t really agree on whats cool, so the fallback is to be generic.
It makes sense for the social graph to be centralized. It would be nice to see this happen on a platform slightly more open (read: portable) than Facebook, but for now it seems that Facebook is it.
What wouldn’t make sense is if Facebook starts trying to tread on cool companies like 4sq, Tumblr etc. They are already huge, why act like dicks at this point (whats with the 4sq in the places logo?)?
What they need to do is reassure developers that they are going to provide a good (open and and with friendly terms) base platform for people to build more niche location based social stuff off of.
In that scenario Foursquare, MyTown etc will have to compete with developers that have location based gameplay using Facebook’s infrastructure. Not something that is terrible in its own right, aside from the fact that ultimately Facebook will retain control over the platform.
Then again, Foursquare has a strong early presence in this market and a very cool brand. If they continue to innovate and push hard I think they should be able to keep a big slice of the ‘places’ market - i.e. businesses who primarily register through Foursquare as a center for their location based social operations.
The internet is a big place, and within that even a niche can be a huge business with a global reach.
Small companies will inevitably feed back through Facebook & co, but as the social web grows up I think people will start to also search for services that fit them (and a specific social group (read: no mum and dad!)) and the specific things they do more closely.
