Facebook just announced “Facebook Presence” at the F8 conference in San Francisco. The big difference between their system and all of the others is that you use a RFID tag to check in at a terminal and not a GPS application.
I do like the idea of being able to check in easily at a location, but in a way I think that this takes all of the fun out of Geo-Social. You aren’t really able to see what friends are up to without logging on to Facebook and there is no way to write a message or post a photo with this system (there may be more information to come about this system).
“Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, the company have given all attendees a small RFID tag attached to their conference badge. This tag is a part of something called “Facebook Presence” which allows you to “check-in” at various places around the conference simply by swiping your badge. Yes, it’s location.”
It will be hard to backend this functionality into a network where people have an average of 130 friends and aren’t as close to all of them. Foursquare, Gowalla, etc was sold as a location-based app and people added friends accordingly. I don’t know if I will want to go through and select which friends can see my movements. For me, it’s a little to ambient.
