According to the recent news Facebook made public they new service called “places”.
So, there is simple question here: how or in what way will it change the world?
I’m pretty sure all of you familiar with such mobile and web service as Foursquare.
And when Facebook started offering something similar it is obvious that people would think about what common points, advantages and disadvantages both of them have.

I couldn’t understand what you are talking about…is it edible?

Let’s start from simple things.
Foursquare is a web and mobile application that allows registered users to connect with friends and update their location.
Points are awarded for “checking in” at venues. Users can choose to have their check-ins posted on their accounts on Twitter, Facebook or both.
Users can also earn badges by checking in at locations with certain tags, for check-in frequency or for other patterns such as time of check-in.
The company has stated that users will be able to add their own custom badges to the site in the future.
Foursquare started out in 2009 with limited availability in only 100 worldwide metro areas.
In January 2010, Foursquare changed their location model to allow check-ins from any location worldwide.
As of March 2010, the service had 500,000 users internationally.
Foursquare currently has iPhone, Android, webOS, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry applications.

In general, this known as Geosocial networking.
To put it simple it is social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics. Geosocial networking can allow users to interact relative to location and time. Web mapping services with geocoding data for places such as streets, buildings, and parks can be used with geotagged information (such as meetups, concert events, or nightclub or restaurant reviews) to match a user with a place or event or local group in which to socialize, or enable a group of users to decide on a meeting activity.

What about Facebook?

As it stated on their web-site, to start using this service you need to do several steps:
” To get started, you’ll need the most recent version of the Facebook application for iPhone. You also can access Places from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and geolocation.
Go to Places on the iPhone application or touch.facebook.com site and then tap the “Check In” button. You’ll see a list of places near you. Choose the place that matches where you are. If it’s not on the list, search for it or add it. After checking in, your check-in will create a story in your friends’ News Feeds and show up in the Recent Activity section on the page for that place. ”
So, as a common sense suggests with Places, its users are in control of what they share and the people they share with. It is also possible to choose whether or not to share the location when one checks in at a place. When you check in, you can tag friends who are with you but only if their settings allow it. When you are tagged, you are always notified.

To sum-up about the difference between these two services, I can only say, that there are benefits and drawbacks in both of them. For example, Facebook has bigger user based and people who are using Facebook can use Places right away, on the other hand, currently it is available only for US. In case of Foursquare, it works worldwide and has pretty features as medals, but number of active users is not so big, so advertisement on a large scale is not possible.
As for me, main drawback of these two apps is the fact it is two of them, so you are to use them both if you already have friends in both accounts. In any case, whatever future brings, we’ll see.

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