Facebook has announced a few items today, following the existing Facebook Places strategy to make location services more mainstream to the 500 million+ Facebook user base. It is good news for all developers including Location Labs. A giant developer ourselves, Location Labs has also recently unveiled Sparkle, a platform for building core, smartphone location based control applications. See our Sparkle Product Page.

Regarding Facebook's announcement today, here are the details:

1) Simply put, they now allow developers to have "write" access to the (Facebook) FB Places database, so that you can share check-ins from other services into FB Places. Prior to today's announcement you could only do a "Read" of the Facebook Places data only. See below for a example of a "write".

2) Other services include the ability to search the venue database in Facebook Places (similar to how you can do this in Google Places). Facebook has given developers access to its database of venues — the developer sends in the coordinate, and Facebook gives back a list of nearby locations. And these aren't based exclusively by proximity — the list will be ordered based on the relevance to the user. This database will be competing with Google's Places API. Facebook will be able to further improve its database as more people check in.

3) A Deals Platform - Ability to get or discover deals when you check-in. Apparently, Facebook has provided an interface for businesses to offer such deals upon check-in for free. This is "squarely" aimed at Foursquare. See the Gaps jeans example below (I am heading over to Gap now ☺)

4) Single Sign-on - This is a button that third-party developers can use to give users a one-click way to sign on. "It removes the need to ever have to type a username or password again," Tseng noted. This is all about "saving you time from things you have to do, to the stuff you want to do," he continued. This is something that Facebook has been talking about for a while. In fact, it's the same permission system Groupon and Zynga use on facebook.com.

With the large existing Facebook userbase and developer ecosystem, Facebook Places is direct challenge to established checkin services. The services that need to re-position themselves accordingly are Google Places, Simplegeo, Foursquare, and other location based social check-in & gaming apps.

Akash Agarwal
SVP Platform

See the way a Gowalla check in appears on the list of the FB Places. This is now possible with the "write" API calls on FB Places

Gap Deals upon Checkin