Facebook Places ‘boring’ says Foursquare chief

Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Foursquare, a location-based social network, has called Places, Facebook’s new check-in tool, “boring” and “unexciting”.

Crowley, said he had now had time to play around with Facebook’s new location tool, which directly rivals his own product by allowing people to share their location with their network, through checking into bars, clubs and restaurants on their mobile phone.

He said: “I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it’s not that great or interesting. It’s a pretty boring service, with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and telling their friends where they are.

“The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.”

Facebook declined to comment.

At the end of last week Facebook launched Places in the US.The new tool lets users share their location in a very similar fashion to popular location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla. People’s friends on the site can see if their friends are near them at any time, if they have chosen to check-into their current location.

Source by telegraph.co.uk

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