Facebook Places not very “Like”-able

Previously in my Locative Services investigation, I used Facebook places for the first time. I wasn’t sold on it then but didn’t want to give up the cause. So I thought, how could Facebook places be most useful? Since its audience is your real-life friend base, I thought that checking in at a popular location would clue my friends that I was there and elicit a greater response. So, while doing homework one night, I checked in at the library. In less than a minute, I had two “likes” to my post.

That night happened to be one of those evenings where I was camped out at the library for some hours. However, in the 3-4 hours I was at the library, I didn’t get any more “likes” to my post and didn’t get any more people trying to find me at the library (that I know of, at least). This brought up one downfall to the Facebook Places platform. It popped up on my friends’ minifeeds right away but then seemed to get lost in the shuffle. Unless you were on Facebook at that minute, you could miss my Places post entirely.

After a couple of hours my Places post switched to the past tense and became “Lindsay Bembenek was at College Library” – even though I was still there (I know, so cool of me). Thus, another downfall: Facebook Places has no way of indicating how long you are at a given location. This also makes it difficult for people to connect.

As more evidence for this point, I referred to the Facebook Places newsfeed. It showed me which of my friends were “nearby”. However, my friends had checked-in over the course of the weekend, so that doesn’t tell me whether they are still nearby now, only that they were once nearby. This would be more useful if all of my friends used Places and checked in more frequently. But for the time being, it doesn’t prove very useful.

In a one-last ditch attempt at Facebook Places, I checked in one evening at my sorority house. I thought this was pretty legit, since I was working on a project and I knew a lot of the girls in my house would be working on it with me.

Alas, sarcasm. The girls who needed to know where I was already knew, and the rest of my friends don’t care. Le sigh.