Facebook’s controversial new feature, Places, is launching today in the US amidst the usual privacy furore that accompanies most of the network’s changes and updates these days – albeit this time there are genuinely relevant safety issues which require negotiation before the feature can be considered unproblematic. For more info on the actual changes, check any one of the detailed write-ups across the blogosphere this morning – but to cut a long story short; Places allows Facebook to know your physical location (once signed-in) and will share this with friends, friends of friends or everyone (depending on your privacy settings). Places will also open up the potential for localised targeted advertising, with info on local shops, bars or services being offered.
The service will initially be ‘opt-in’ and will use ‘friends-only’ as the default privacy setting so as to avoid users unwittingly broadcasting their location to the whole network due to unfamiliarity with the new feature. Obviously there are still serious security issues (when people know where you are they also know where you’re not) and unfortunately it’s a little too easy right now to imagine the Places feature to be, even if only in a very small number of cases, a potential aid to stalking, burglary and other such ugly crimes.
Regardless of this, it is not actually the security side of things that I wanted to discuss in relation to Facebook Places right now (that has already been covered in detail elsewhere), but instead I wanted to consider some of the implications for the increasing localisation of the mobile web.
The true significance of Facebook Places, I believe, is rather in providing us yet another important stepping stone in the increasingly prominent process that is the localisation of the mobile web. With the ever growing potency of mobile devices (whether smart-phones, tablet computers, sat-navs, netbooks etc), localised services are more and more becoming the norm – including everything from local area information, maps and nearby services, right through to the accompanying localised targeted advertising.
This latter aspect will I expect provide a significant surge in online ad spends once the mobile targeted ad delivery systems become widespread and developed enough to be accessible enough for smaller businesses also. Finally, even these local independent shops, bars and services will now also have an effective incentive to utilise web advertising (which was not really the case before – not many of my local barbers for example have a web presence, or an advertising budget). Now even a tiny newsagent or a tea room will be able to register its presence and pay for advertising on localised mobile devices – alerting nearby potential customers who are logging into Facebook (or anything else for that matter, given a bit more time) of the existence of whatever they seek: a sort of mobile fancy digital Yellow pages, with maps and sat-nav integrated if you will.
In this sense, I expect many will be grateful to Facebook for leading this localisation of the mobile web and once again proving that they can have a significant impact on web traffic and thereby ad spend (we’re all already aware of the power of the ‘like’ button to boost traffic for websites and blogs). That certainly is something worthy of recognising and applauding, without of course forgetting about the aforementioned attendant security issues. Hats off to Facebook on the concept – they just need to carefully and sensibly manage the implementation now.
