On the surface, Google Places and Facebook Places would seem to have a lot in common.
Both services are out to create a landing page for every local business in the world.
Both services allow local merchants to “claim” their pages, giving the merchant some editorial control over content on the page.
And both services no doubt expect to grab a chunk of what is projected to be a $32B digital, local advertising market by 2013 by claiming the middleman position between the merchant and the end user.
But where the two services break from each other – and in a non-trivial way – is in their respective distribution strategies.
Google Places are useful. They all show up in Google Maps.
Facebook Places, by contrast, are useless. They just add spam to the newsfeed.
I don't even know why Facebook thought "check ins" would be a good idea. Because Foursquare did it? Foursquare is interesting because of its game elements, not because you "check in" to places. The whole idea of a checking in is kind of silly if you aren't playing a game. You could just as easily, you know, do exactly what you did before: Say where you are.
If they wanted to be ahead of the game they could have created a services that automatically updates your location and shares that only with people who might find that information relevant (i.e. very close friends and family). Oh wait, Google already did that with Latitude. No worry, I'm sure Facebook will copy that too. That's what all that funding is for.
