Last night, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Places at their headquarters in Palo Alto, California.  Facebook Places is a location-based check-in service that allows users to share where they are, find out where their friends are and discover places in their area. Users can also tag friends when they check in, something that other services do not currently offer. The service allows businesses to create or claim Places on Facebook and encourage users to check in. Eventually this could lead to the ability to offer discounts or promotional messages to users at a location or nearby.

Location based check-in services have been growing in popularity and it’s been hard to ignore the rumors and hype surrounding the launch of Facebook’s own product. The big question has been: will a Facebook check-in service destroy competitor applications?

During the announcement, Zuckerburg joked about all the features Facebook would not be integrating into the new platform.  However in a dazzling display of netizenship, Facebook decided to play nice with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booya (the makers of MyTown). While Facebook will continue to port over all your social good from the most popular location-based services, the impact on these competitors remains to be seen. According to the most recent Mashable poll, only 30% of people say they will use the service (but another 30% responded “Maybe: I’m going to wait and see”), suggesting adoption may start off slow.

Much like Social Graph, Places promises to unify even more data from across the web. It is only a matter of time before Facebook launches other services such as: peer to peer payment systems, similar to Paypal, group deal sites, similar to Groupon, and online classifieds, similar to Craigslist.

According to comScore, as of July Facebook is the third largest video site in the U.S. Last March the Private Data Equity Center valued Facebook at $35 Billion. InsideFacebook.com states they are projected to hit $1.1 Billion in ad sales revenue after hitting 700 million in 2009. With these numbers, we’re not to far away from saying, “Hey I’ll just Facebook you the money,” or “Just sell it on Facebook.”

Are you going to use Facebook Places? What’s next for Facebook? We want to hear from you!

To provide yet another reason to claim and manage the local listings of your clients, Google has just rolled out Places Pages to Android devices.  If you recall from a few months ago, Google renamed their local business center profiles to Places Pages.  Every single location in Google Local has its own Places Page with a unique URL.  These pages, or a very similar mobile representation of them, are now available through Android.  A new icon appears in the apps launcher of all Android devices, allowing users to search through the massive local directory.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Android was present on 6 of the top 20 phones in June 2010 (source)
• Android commands an 11% market share as of June 2010 (source)
• Android is present on 60 devices in 48 countries (source)
• Mobile search on Android grew 300% in the first half of 2010 (source)
• An Android phone is being activated every 2 seconds (source)

Because of this amazing rate of adoption on a significant number of devices, it makes a lot of sense to ensure that all venues for customers to find your store are representing you in the best manner.  This is just one more indicator that local search is going to keep growing at the rate it has been, and it is just one more reason for business owners of all sizes to pay attention to that space.

Read the full article here: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/07/even-better-way-to-find-places-nearby.

We love workplace cliches, so when we stumbled across this blank verse celebrating the phrases we love to hate , we laughed out loud. Kudos Jesse Brown of the Search Engine. We salute you.

I’ve been a regular user of Facebook since it’s inception in 2004, when it was first marketed amongst collegians as an exclusive social network. When I heard about it from my randomly-assigned freshman roommate, I could barely grasp what she was talking about. “A face? Whose face? A book? What kind of book?” “No, no,” she said, exasperated. “F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K. Dot com!” Over the next four years, my relationship with Facebook mutated more often than Burger King’s marketing campaign; my peers and I generated online personas and expanded our networks exponentially, all under the semblance of control and ownership.

The rate of change in Facebook rivals its rate of integration into our lives. For hours on end, we update, like, share, chat and peruse the profiles of friends, bands, companies…of everything and nothing at all. This behavior makes Facebook the perfect vessel through which companies can reach their audiences. Given the time we spend on Facebook, the nature of what we share and the potential data available to advertisers, privacy is certainly important to users. But how important?

The general consensus is that consumers will continue to “sacrifice” their privacy because they value the experience so much. Maybe Facebook will continue to serve 400 million users because it’s made mistakes and innovations in a way that makes it seem like its growing up with its audience. We believe Facebook is listening and making every effort to protect us. Like parents who thrive on that semblance of control and ownership, millions of users, save for a fraction of outspoken and conscious ones (like, say, 35,000 people), won’t care about Open Graph and its ability to “target you on an even more granular level,” nor the Graph API, which “makes it much easier to parse, collate and thus search through user info.” More specifically, Open Graph allows website URLs to be part of the Facebook universe and advertisers are able to trace and track users who connect to those websites, much like Facebook Pages.

As an avid Facebook user and marketer, the big question after the ruckus dies down about things like “privacy” and “transparency” is whether or not most people care. And not only do I wonder how many people care, but who exactly cares?

We want to hear from you! Do you think a significant amount of users negatively react after companies adapt this new knowledge stream? How will Facebook resolve its liminal stance between connecting users and monetizing their participation?

If you use Google Analytics, here’s a solid method for how to view your goal conversion funnels in any report, segmented however you want. John from LunaMetrics calls the report “Horizontal Funnel” since you can view it left to right, instead of top to bottom. Here’s what the report will look like:

Check out the details. Thanks to John at LunaMetrics for the tip!