Last week Facebook launched Places,  its new feature for geolocalization.

As they set foot on a field previously lead by Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook will take LSBNs to the mass. Although the previous two have seen a massive increase of their userbase, this is nothing to compare to Facebook’s.

So now 500 Millions users can check-in places. Great. But then what ?

Most of the LSBNs are based on referencing places in which you may check-in, and eventually find tips provided by other people visiting the same places.

These networks are more “I-know-the-place” oriented rather than having a “discover-new-places” focus.

Users will usually fire-up their application in order to check into a venue they are located in instead of trying to find a place nearby. For that purpose, they will use other applications (AroundMe, Google Maps, Yelp…).

LSBNs will find their true potential once they become a social guide to the city. And actually, a social guide to all cities, all villages, all places. The content will be user generated, and will allow:

- Users to discover new places, get information, rate a venue, provide a feedback available to everyone. Users will also be able to search in realtime for an event taking place in the city or nearby, get coupons or sales for specific places, and even get a notification once they are near a location selling the product they are looking for.

- Providers will be able to advertize their products, sales, link their online catalogues – or menus for restaurants and bars – with the venues (geolocation based shopping/product listing/notification of product availability). Users will be able to subscribe to content pushed by a venue (e.g. sales, happy hour).

Geolocation has become a hot trend since a few years, and many exciting products have seen the light, leveraging the full potential unleached by embedded GPS in Smartphones, from standard route assistant to augmented reality.

LSBNs have been more focused on the social aspect completely setting aside the content part, thus having little interest, but playing the game of “check-ins” and collecting awards. This is one main reason why Forrester suggested that marketers still wait before engaging into these channels.

Facebook has now gathered all the ingredients for the new era of LSBNs. It has the users, it has the content, it has the Pages and now it has the Places. All it needs is linking-it-all.

Foursquare and Gowalla should very soon partner with content and reference providers, and should engage their users for documenting the venues, in which case, they have a chance to catch-up to Facebook.

Facebook has reinvented the social networking, beating in popularity all its predecessors (MySpace and Bebo). It has long lived as the poppy cheery Social Media company and then came Twitter. Micro-blogging. Follwers and not friends. Search. Live stream. Easy access URLs.

Facebook didn’t see the threat coming until it was there. Even since, Facebook has made a huge work trying to catch up with Twitter. It changed its (long controversed) new home page to include live stream, it then included Vanity URLs. Recently, Facebook introduced the universal status, allowing people outside Facebook to see your status.

Now the new feature Facebook has come up with is… Followers. Yeah, highly innovative feature, it’s been there since 3 years on Twitter but anyway.

It is now activated by default and allows people to add you not as a friend and access your complete profile, but as a person to follow including your status updates into their new stream, as an opt-in system.

For privacy reasons, you can either choose to keep it on or de-activate it (Settings -> Notifications).

Let us analyze this new feature introduction and how it has been introduced.

Facebook has made no announcement to the introduction to this feature, hence users are not notified that their streams are public by default and that anyone can subscribe to them (understand by this: your boss, unwanted public). This is a major issue especially when several UE agencies have asked all major social networks to have a better control on default privacy options.

Second, I barely see users subscribe to other people’s feeds. The whole Facebook architecture is not meant for that. Profiles are heavy and full loaded with pictures, applications and other things. People are barely solely interested in incognito’s status updates within the whole flow of information they are already getting. Either be friends or wander away. Hence, I seriously doubt there will be a serious adoption of this feature by Facebook users. This is highly unlike Twitter where the Following/Follower system is as the essence of the service, and where you have applications that allow you to manage your stream, which is not Facebook’s case.

Furtherly, how do you decide wether you want to subscribe to someone or not ? Will you be provided with a history of the statuses ? Can you make a profile search based on criterias just as Twitter does ? Will the friend suggestion engine take into account subscriptions as a fan on the base of people you are following and not just those you are friend with ?

On the contact list level, how do you manage your fans ? Can you see them and search through them ? Can you block them ? Are you notified when someone adds you as a fan ? Ideally if Facebook wanted this thing working right, as soon as you have fans, you’d have a spin-off of your profile into a real fan page to which people subscribe. Your statuses would then be broadcasted to the fan page and hence to your fans.

Facebook is most probably driving a bad strategy right now. Instead of pursuing the innovation quest, just as it successfully did during the last years, it is now plunging into the catch-up competition, which means you’re already second to introduce the feature. These guys should step to the next running field and have lead the competition instead of trying to imitate their fellow entrepreneurs.

Le ciblage publicitaire du couple Microsoft/Facebook (le premier gérant les campagnes publicitaires du second) a l’air de faire son petit bonhomme de chemin. Je me demande dans quelle mesure, il s’appuie sur les informations publiques du profil, et dans quelle mesure il s’appuie uniquement sur mon adresse IP.

La contre-partie, est que cette bannière à l’air de s’inscruster. Elle constitue désormais 70% de l’affichage publicitaire que j’observe à travers les pages, sans parler de son “apparition spontannée” entre deux pages, ce qui laisse présager un ciblage très axé sur la provenance géographique et un peu moins sur le contenu que présente mon profil (contrairement aux campagnes que j’observe depuis Paris).

Reste à voir combien de personnes vont effectivement souscrire un abonnement via Internet en général et via Facebook en particulier.