Facebook Places: Mark Zuckerberg at the launch. Photograph: Robert Galbraith/Reuters
Facebook's geo-location service has finally arrived – ladies and gentlemen, Facebook Places. It mimics the "checking-in" functionality made famous by Foursquare and Gowalla, and allows Facebook users to see where their friends are, and when.
But it goes deeper than that. Facebook has worked with Foursquare and Gowalla to fully integrate their services; it allows badges and check-ins to be imported – not only from Foursquare and Gowalla, but MyTown and Yelp too. The smaller services are exposed to hundreds of millions of users while Facebook becomes a geolocation services aggregator overnight.
Whether these services should be worried depends on the space Facebook moves forward into. Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown rely on a strong gaming element to gain traction. Foursquare helps local businesses and national brands generate and deepen consumer loyalty. Yelp is about peer recommendation. Facebook could move into any one of these spaces without blinking.
But perhaps there are bigger fish to fry – namely Craigslist. In 15 years, nobody has challenged the site's supremacy in the area of classifieds. That's not to say there aren't start-ups that consider themselves contenders, but none have come close to the site's (rumoured) nine-figure annual turnover or its ubiquitous association with online classifieds.
Since 1995, Craigslist has been instrumental in migrating a cash-rich revenue stream from newspapers to the internet. But Craigslist hasn't moved on since. The most obvious evolution of classifieds is the migration to mobile, utilising geolocation. Craigslist has had more than two years to play with the iPhone, yet has no mobile presence other than a third-party app that mimics the navigation of the site, instead of playing to the strengths of the device.
The iPad version is even worse – all that on-screen real estate, and it's still menu-driven. Why not a map, for crying out loud? Craigslist's own efforts are non-existent – despite its millions of dollars, the site isn't optimised for mobile browsers.
Craigslist, in a continued attempt to keep things simple, has dropped the ball. The mobile web – through web and native mobile apps, and optimised websites too – will revolutionise business in the next five years, just as the internet did 15 years ago. Ignoring trends in design is one thing; ignoring consumer-driven platforms is quite another.
When I look at Facebook Places, I see an impending marriage with Facebook Marketplace and a serious threat to Craigslist. Don't think of Facebook Places as simply being about checking in; it's about the broader ability to create geo-tagged content that can have relevance to tens of thousands of users in a given vicinity.
A simple Marketplace button on the mobile app (and the site) that mashes together Google Maps and local listings local to the user – or allows the user to add simple, geo-tagged listings with photos too – would enjoy massive takeup and become an essential service in no time. Why would you ever look at Craigslist again?
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