Goodbye Facebook Places

Less than a year after Facebook deployed “Places” to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook is pulling the plug on Places over the next few weeks.

Despite its 750 million members, Facebook could not leverage its mass to make “places” work

Facebook Places never really got much traction compared to other self standing geolocalization platforms like Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and other niche platforms.  Places though is not going the way of the dinosaurs, Facebook opted to integrate the localization feature directly in the post, on the wall.

The new feature will allow any user to tag locations in their posts.  They won’t need a smart phone or be near the place for that matter.  They will be able to use the feature from a computer, tablet or any other device giving them access to the internet using the “Places” icon at the bottom of the post

What does that mean for users.  As Facebook changed its aim from Foursquare to Groupon with the deployment of the Facebook “Deals”, we can expect a closer integration of “Deals” with the posts and more online offers.  Hopefully these offers will not clog the wall

Good news though, after the uproar on Facebook privacy settings and the bad habit Facebook had to make new features “opt-out”, Facebook seems to have listened to users and the location feature will be “opt-in”

Who knows, they may even start a new trend that will lead more companies to adopt the “opt-in” model rather that the “opt-out” model.

Coming soon, major revamp of Facebook privacy settings

Facebook maybe listening after all, or is it the influence of Google +.

In the next couple of days, Facebook will release a major revamp of the privacy settings.

The revamp will affect both the profile and the way others share information about you as well as how your posts, images… are shared.

The privacy settings, although extensive were still confusing and somewhat hidden under the “account” tab.

The new privacy settings will be on the profile page (in the edit section), more intuitive, you will be able to decide who sees what on your profile section by section

When it comes to sharing, Facebook is implementing a number of new changes and making them easier to understand and apply.

  • You will be able to tag anybody if they are on Facebook, not just your friends.  When you do so, the person tagged will receive a notice and will have the option to accept or remove the tag
  • You can set your settings to allow your friends to tag you without your approval (I would not recommend it though)
  • Before you post anything to your wall, you will see a drop down menu that will allow you to decide who sees the content (public, friends or custom).
  • A little known privacy feature allowed users to control tags in the past.  In the new version, when somebody tags you, you will have the option to remove the tag, ask the person who posted the tag to remove the photo or video or block the person.

Facebook privacy settings are quite extensive but you still have to take the time to learn them and understand how they work and use them accordingly.

 

 

LinkedIn reports earnings, base growing to 116M

LinkedIn reported its first earning since going public in May.  The company reported a $4.5M profit for the second quarter (2c a share) on $121M revenue, a 50% increase over last year.

Don’t get too excited on the earning side, at least in the short term, the company  declared that they were willing to sacrifice short term earnings to invest in new technology and product development.

On the user side, LinkedIn announced 116M users, a 61% increase over the same time last year.

The user numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt though.  Over the last year, we have seen spammers creating massive numbers of fake profiles to spam discussion groups and infiltrate personal networks.

LinkedIn has been notorious for their lack of action against spam and spammers, one might argue, to ring up higher number of “users”, it will be interesting to see if they will change course in the future and tackle that growing issue before it has an impact on their real base.

Let’s hope for us users that some of the investment in technology and new product will address that growing problem.