Facebook Launches Facebook Places Service

This article will present information about the new service of Facebook, which is Places, but also about the company’s new acquisition. I’m talking about Chai Labs. Let’s start with the beginning.

Facebook launched on Thursday  a new service called Facebook Places which tells the friends of a certain user where is the exact location of that certain user and what the user does, says The Guardian. For the moment only available in the United States, but is expected to appear soon in Europe.

The service is very easy to use. To tell your friends where you can be found, you need only to post a message, as like you post anything else on the social networking site. There is also a safety function that allows the user to choose who can see where they are located and which of their friends will be set “by default” to see these locations.

In addition, the Facebook members can show also to whom they are next, as long as that person is also a member of Facebook. The information is displayed together with the update and uses, according to news.cnet.com the same tagging system (labels) as that used in photos.

Once it is created, a place becomes a permanent part of Facebook, although it can be deleted by the one who first posted it. Facebook Places is available, of course, for mobile phones. For iPhone there already exists and an application, and Blackberry and Android phones will be the next ones which will benefit of this feature.

When you click the “Places”, the users see their friends who addressed also to geotagging services and hence the locations where they are. Also they have the opportunity to turn public the places where they are, with another button which, when pressed, presents users a list of cafes, restaurants and other nearby areas of interest. Choices are published immediately on the Facebook account.

The Facebook new launched location services could generate an annual revenue of $ 4 billion by 2015. The world’s most popular social network has launched a new service that will enable the 500 million users to indicate their location, application that could generate advertising revenue by 4.1 billion U.S. dollars annually by 2015, informs Bloomberg .

The service, called “Places”, allows users to locate and notify their friends where they are, according to the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Let’s hope that this will be indeed possible. Borrell Associates estimates that the service could generate up to 4.1 billion U.S. dollars annually by 2015, that can help the advertisers to reach faster the consumers by targeting them when they are about to make a purchase.

In the future, Facebook will include an advertising component for Places, said Zuckerberg. This is only the first subject of this news. Next we will say a few words about the most recent purchase made by Facebook.

Facebook bought Chai Labs, a startup company, with $ 10 million, a transaction that concerns more the purchase of talent than the acquisition of technology, because nobody knows exactly what this company does. It was founded in 2007 by Gokul Rajaram, the “godfather” of Google Adsense, writes pcmag.com.

While the company presents itself as a company that creates search sites, it seems that Chai Labs is more focused on editorial content launching, according to the same source. Among the Chai Labs shareholders- which raised 2.4 million dollars to start this business – we can include Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape Communications, Reid Hoffman, chairman of LinkedIn and Joe Kraus from Google Ventures.

It seems that this new feature will be available for all the 500 million users, that Facebook has, but how many users actually this network has? A French newspaper contradicts the official figure of 500 million. The most popular social network has announced recently that the number surpassed 500 million users and the business this year could go to 1.4 billion dollars. The French publication Les Echos demonstrates that Facebook has provided false information regarding the number of users.

“Those are 500 million active members, that have been connected and have made at least a share last month,” said representatives of Facebook, without specifying whether it is individuals or different IP addresses of persons who have multiple accounts. The arguments of the French magazine target users in some cities where the number exceeds the number of the residents.

Thus, the number of users in Oslo exceeds 3 times the number of the citizens. Same situation in Paris, where a population of 2.2 million inhabitants provides 4.5 million active members on Facebook. In the Ile-de-France there are 10.7 million users, which is 92% of the total population of the region. Whether the figures are accurate or not, we probably won’t find out, because there is very hard also for the network to realise and to count how many active users they have.

If we go back to the acquisition of Chai Labs, we can find also that this is the latest acquisition of Facebook after one month ago the company bought NextStop travel recommendations company. Chai Labs is led by the former product manager of AdSense, an application launched by  Google for the site owners to earn money by posting ads on their Websites.

Chai Labs is described as “a platform that allows publishers to adapt and launch scalable search sites and friendly, which can help the media companies to create, store and deliver content. This is important for Facebook given the fact that the management of social networking rather wants to work with media companies than to be in competition with them.

Google, the most popular online search engine, has started indexing the Status updates on Facebook pages to enter the searches in real time, says The Telegraph. This started to happen in March 2010 and the work gets better and better. So, if you write something on your Facebook account and also share the info on your own Website, those who are following you, can see what you have written, even without the need of entering your site.

They can enter your name in the Google search box and find that you are sleeping, according to your words before thinking of going to bed. This integration comes a week after the search engine indexed updates for the MySpace users. The search engine also integrates since the end of last year the messages posted on Twitter social network.