Facebook launches Places in USA, India waiting

Facebook has announced a location enabled service named Places with which users can share their current location on the site in real time.
In a blog post, Michael Sharon, product manager, Places, Facebook, said that the application also enables Facebook users to tag friends who are with them and locate other friends who are nearby.
The service is only available for iPhone users in the USA, to begin with. iPhone users will need to download an updated version of the Facebook iPhone application in order to access the new service. Facebook said it will look to offer the service in more countries and on more platforms soon.
If a user’s mobile Browser supports HTML 5 and geo location, the features can be accessed from touch.facebook.com.
A user is required to ‘check in’ to a particular place in order to share his location with his friends.
Checking In lists near by places and a user can choose a place that matches his/her location. If the place is not listed, the user can search for it or add it. The check in will create a story in the user’s friends’ news feeds and show up in the recent activity section on the page for that place.
Although the feature is not yet available in India, it might be a viable business opportunity for Facebook.
A similar location based service has been developed by Telenity for telecom operators Airtel and BSNL.
Yogesh Bijlani, country head and general manager, Asia Pacific, said, “Airtel’s Buddy Finder and BSNL’s Friend Finder have been quite successful so far in India.”
He added, “I do not have a specific number to share about how many people are using Buddy Finder but I can say Telco’s do not do above the line campaign for any product which has less than a million subscribers. So what I can say is we definitely have more than one million subscribers for Buddy Finder.”
He also said that this initiative by Facebook will be an instant hit in India as this social networking site has a mass appeal over here and it even works on low cost handsets and is operator independent.
Apart from that he said this application will also catalyse LBS market in India to launch something which is simple but has a mass appeal.
Jagish Mitra, chief executive officer, CanvasM, said, “It is seen that location based services limited to one operator is usually not successfully, whereas those which are operator independent are received well. The new Facebook application Places is expected to do well in India as it works across all operators.”
He added, “Although we are not doing anything specific for social networking, but we have a larger program on location aggregation, which works across operators. This has been launched globally and depending on the kind of response we get, the same will be launched in India.”
Recently even FICCI had organised a roundtable on LBS to discuss the opportunities and challenges in offering Location based services.
Rakesh Mahajan, VP Marketing Business Head, VAS and Incubation Mobile Services, had said to Telecom Yatra on the sidelines of FICCI round table on LBS that, “Airtel plans to take LBS to the next level by incorporating location awareness in all it’s VAS offerings.”