Facebook Places: A Damp Squib in the UK?
Facebook Places Launches in the UK
…And the crowd goes mild
A month after it’s explosive launch in the US, Facebook Places went live to what seems to be a thoroughly underwhelmed user-base in the UK this morning.
There was no flurry of experimental check-ins and no excited banter on Twitter. OK, so you need an iPhone to use the new feature, but that’s not a small population. It’s only the first day, but Facebook Places hasn’t generated any buzz so far.
A quick survey of what friends and colleagues could see in their News Feeds (representing a broad variety of Facebook friend demographics) suggested that only around 0.7% of Facebook users have bothered to check-in anywhere. This is entirely un-scientific and very anecdotal, but I’d have expected a higher level of obvious and observable activity – even if only prompted by curiosity.
No doubt it’ll pick up as more people notice the feature over this weekend and during the coming weeks. However, the unavoidable truth about Facebook Places is that it’s just not that engaging. At least not by comparison with Foursquare and especially Gowalla.
Foursquare’s co-founder, Dennis Crowley, was interviewed in the Telegraph during the week following the US launch. His opinion of Facebook Places was unequivocal:
I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it’s not that great or interesting … with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and telling their friends where they are. The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.
It’s going to be interesting to watch the development of Facebook Places in the UK market. It shouldn’t take long to achieve a reasonablle critical-mass of user check-ins, but in many ways the real test will be the take-up of venue ownership by businesses and how they use the platform as part of their broader location-based marketing strategies.
The impact on Foursquare and Gowalla will be interesting too.
