Facebook Launches Places, Its Location Check-in Service

As expected, Facebook has launched Facebook Places, the social networking giant’s equivalent to Foursquare’s location check-in service. Users using the service will be able to check-in in a similar fashion to Foursquare, and can even tag friends who are in the area, even if they don’t have a device to check-in. Of course, such a move will undoubtedly raise privacy concerns, and the service currently defaults to friends only, though it can be tweaked in the settings page. Users will also be able to remove themselves from tags once, or even permanently. The feature is currently available through Facebook’s touch-friendly version of the site, as well as the iPhone app. Facebook is already planning to add check-in support for the Android, BlackBerry and other platforms. Aside from the check-in feature, the new iPhone app allows the background uploading of photos and videos in iOS 4 devices and also allows users to set the privacy level of individual status updates.