After much teasing and tantalising, one of the long rumoured Facebook location features is out in the wild in the form of place community pages. They vary in scale from a hamlet in Spain …
… through to New York City.
It’s clever though not particularly sophisticated at this stage; a simple exposure of Wikia’s underlying geo metadata and it probably took very little effort to implement. Facebook appear to treat places as people, hence the exhortation to connect with the place.
For now there’s very little additional geo element present though what is there is probably enough to get people to connect with and like local community places or places they already feel a connection with, their home town, neighbourhood, honeymoon spot and so on. That alone should yield valuable demographic and (geo)targetable information.
This is pretty much a classic case of picking low hanging fruit for Facebook and a far better exemplar of a place than the somewhat clumsy rebranding of Google’s small business listings as places, though the browse places page seems to suggest otherwise as it’s very POI heavy.
It will be facinating to track how this feature of Facebook develops and matures.
Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of Places for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:
- Facebook Places; Haven’t We Been Here Before?
A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it’s justified or not and, to location...
- Facebook’s (Creepy) Bid For Your Homepage
Most browsers have a variation on the theme of a home page, which automagically loads your favourite web page when you start the browser or open a new browser window...
- Crystal Ball Gazing Part 2 – Eddy’s Sofa and The Nightmare of a Single Global Places Register
I recently contributed an article to the OpenGeoData, the blog and podcast on open maps, data and OpenStreetMap, a snippet of which is below. “Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time...
- Deliciousness: hairy landings, Twitter (mis)identity, escaped cat, the United States of Facebook and mapme.at
The latest batch of social bookmarks from my Delicious stream: Hamburg airport + Lufthansa plane + storm = a flight I’d really prefer not to be on. Dennys publicise their...
- Fighting GeoBabel on Two Fronts
The well known, highly opinionated and occasionally error prone Tech Crunch seems to think there’s a location war going on. A search for the keywords location and war on the...
Great find! I don’t seem to be able to access the “browse places” page though.
(Re: treating places as people). they treat people and places and everything else simply as connected ‘objects’.
I added Open Graph geolocation meta data to http://hereis.eu I can’t wait to see if these ‘objects’ show up!
scratch that – I can access it. you’ve got a “)” at the end of your link.
Ack. Simple schoolboy HTML editing error. I’ve just corrected it and repushed the post.
It’ll be cool if they let you add sub places and build a hierachy of places.
I agree with Ben. and the notion of a place in this sense is rather literal. (my kitchen is a place). The Open Graph protocol does define a “landmark” type, but it’s still a very limited way of categorizing things. I’m sure this will widen in time.