Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Places, a direct competitor to the location based social network Foursquare.
It seems that currently Facebook Places will have slightly less functionalities than Foursquare, so as mentionned on PC World: “Foursquare currently has a slight edge in its real-time stats feature that logs such information as the most recent customers, the frequency of their visits, gender breakdown and the tips visitors have left. (By contrast, Facebook Places currently only shows who has checked into a location.)”
However it only seems a matter of time before Facebook offers a more complete service than Foursquare, especially after the buy out of the Hot Potato team, a team of social media sign in experts, for $10 million.
And Foursquare is not the only one feeling the pressure, Google which never managed to make Google Lattitude a hit, could be worried that Facebook Places, which is using Bing Maps instead of Google Maps could become the reference in terms of location based social networks, therefore damaging Google Map’s popularity.
An interesting play, that we will monitor very closely over the next few months.
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