5 Early Examples Of Innovation Using Facebook Places

Facebook September 27, 2010 6 Comments @niallharbison

So Facebook places has only been around for about a month and is not even here in Ireland yet but already we are starting to see some pretty innovative uses start to pop up over the world. The beauty with Facebook Places is that you have such a big mainstream audience compared to something like Foursquare if you can convince people to actually start checking in and using the service. My own guess is that it’ll take a while for this to fully catch on with the mainstream and will only really become totally useful when Facebook roll some more features in Facebook places but the early adoption rates seem pretty promising. Here are some of the most innovative uses that I have seen by people using Facebook places to date….

Nike Burrito Twitter Truck

Nike tapped in to some of the trendiest things around (Twitter, Facebook Places and Food trucks) with this promotion to give away jackets dressed up as burritos at a recent football game. It was all about being in the know and following them on Twitter with the final step being that you had to check in on Facebook places to win your special burrito which actually contained a jacket. Small early use of Facebook places but crucially is shows that you can drive people to a physical location and have them check in and basically push that information through their social graph.

Kentucky University Recruitment Through Facebook Places

This college in Kentucky were one of the first people to get the jump on everybody with some innovative Facebook marketing. They made giant cut outs of the Facebook places symbol and placed them all around the college encouraging their students to check in. The thinking here was that it would hep with recruitment as the friends of all the poeple checking in would see more and more information about the college appearing in their stream.

Burglars Targeting Empty Hosues

People robbing houses may not be a legit business but burglars where not slow in their take up of Facebook places apparently using it to see when people had left their houses. Now there has been a lot of scare mongering about Facebook places (it can be used against you of course but just remember that everything you do online is public anyway) but in reality it is highly unlikely. Stories like this do make great news and there is no doubt that people who are malicious enough could use these tools to their advantage but I think you’ll find that very few burglars in your area are smart enough to be using location based services just yet.

Facebook’s Places Wall

This video was taken at the launch of Facebook places and if anything is one of the scariest things that I have ever seen! It shows up tiny dots of people checking in all across the USA the second it launched on Facebook and it blows my mind how much information like this Facebook is collecting about us. It’s very early days in this space but you can imagine how powerful location based data like this matched up with our social graph could eventually be to both advertisers, businesses and brands.

Nearby Friends

Again this is an application that is not of great use to me yet given that Facebook Places is not even released yet where I live but I can at least see where some of my friends are around the world. There is no doubt that this app does have stalker qualities to it and you might want to be careful about letting it access your information but you can see how applications like this could become useful in the future for keeping track of friends especially international friends that you might not see that often!