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!

At the Mashable Media Summit yesterday, Adam Ostrow of Mashable interviewed Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare, who got the crowd excited about his company’s plans.

This year, the company raised capital, hired 25 people and made some money. Still, Foursquare has yet to make any profit because, as Crowley explained, being profitable is not a focus right now. Instead the team is focused on innovating new features and building an infrastructure to support their impressive growth.

According to Crowley, the Foursquare team has so many ideas they ran out of whiteboards at the office. For users, this may mean more badges, city travel guides based on your friends’ favorite places, more “to-do” features, the ability to connect with people at your location, retail rewards for check-ins and maybe even another title to strive for in addition to Mayor. For businesses, this may mean more partnership opportunities, more input on badge creation, greater access to customer data and the ability to design rewards for check-ins or mayors.

When asked about Foursquare haters (Time magazine labeled Foursquare among the 50 worst inventions), Crowley politely countered with the notion that people like software challenging you to do something, inspiring you to do it and rewarding you when you achieve it.

If you’re attending a lot of Internet Week events, don’t forget to check in and get your badge!

Yesterday Mashable hosted its first conference, marking the significant growth the social media blog has experienced over the past year. The agenda was packed with presentations and interviews designed to make you think a little differently about how digital channels can help your brand.

Ricky Van Veen, co-founder of CollegeHumor and CEO of Notional, shared 10 myths about online content. While some of the myths Van Veen spoke about were basic considering what we know today, there’s no denying the fact that his understanding of what makes digital content so appealing is what made CollegeHumor a success. And talk about foresight – the site was founded in 1999!

Here are two myths that stuck out:

1. Myth: We have no idea why things go viral. Van Veen definitely knows why things go viral. Good online content provides a person a reason to pass it on. The act of sharing a link is a way for someone to say something about themselves (I’m smart/ funny/interesting/edgy), so the content needs to hit that emotional appeal. Van Veen says a successful viral video will have “candy corn.” What’s candy corn? The thing that everyone knows about but doesn’t necessarily think about all the time. Check out this video for Van Veen’s example of good digital candy corn.
2. Myth: Experience leads documentation. According to Van Veen, documentation leads experience. Technology has broken down barriers to content creation and people want to document (and experience) moments. He likened the Facebook and Twitter phenomenon to high-tech bragging: people want to show off how cool/smart/interesting they are.

Over the next few days, we’ll continue to share highlights from the conference.

Excited by the Facebook-Marin integration and Chris Copeland’s “Life After Google” speech at SIS Captiva, we scoured the Web for money quotes on Facebook’s monetization strategy.

We learned Facebook wants to position as a demand-generation channel, against Google, in the 90% of the funnel above the point of purchase. Expect Facebook to join Microsoft’s Atlas in speaking out against the last-click attribution model and bringing innovative multi-attribution solutions to the table in the coming months.

Here’s how ex-Googler Sandberg laid it out for Vogue:

“Google makes money because it commands 50 percent of online advertising dollars spent on that final stage, the one that gets people to make a purchase. But that stage represents only 10 percent of all ‘ad spend’— here she writes “$690 billion,” then draws an arrow to her ‘online ad spend’ column. Facebook can dominate the other 90 percent devoted to ‘demand generation’ ($621 billion a year!). It’s not unreasonable, she thinks, that Facebook could wind up getting a substantial part of that, every year.”

Mashable’s article on Vogue’s profile is here:

http://www.buzzbox.com/top/default/preview/vogue-features-facebook-coo-sheryl-sandberg-in-may-issue/?id=1066949&topic=facebook%3Asheryl-sandberg