Facebook Places and Google Places: What’s in a Name?

Posted: August 19th, 2010 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Social Media Opinion | 1 Comment

Last night, Facebook sprang its new Facebook Places product on the world. At its core, it’s a lot like Foursquare. It allows you to “check in” at a location using the GPS on your mobile device. The major difference is that while using Places, you’re not competing to become “mayor” of anything, as you are on Foursquare. With Places, you’re simply sharing your physical location with Facebook friends.

Google has its own location product. Interestingly, it’s called Google Places.

Despite using the same names, Facebook and Google Places are completely different products.

Facebook Places is simply adding another way you can tell people what you’re up to, by using geolocation.

Google Places is a re-branding of Google’s Local Business Center. It launched back in April, and included a ton of new features. Its basic goal is to get local businesses to “claim” their Google Place page on the web, fill it up with information, use it to serve things like coupons, and then (hopefully) buy advertising with Google to direct people to it. Geolocation is a feature, but it’s not even closely related to how Facebook is using it.