Facebook Places: To Check In or Not to Check In

This article was originally published at Oxstein Labs.

Facebook Places has been live for almost two weeks now.  Have you tried it out?  Do you plan to?  Do you care?  Only 19% of the worldwide cell phone market is smart phones and the word on the street is that Foursquare users are happy with Foursquare.

That will undoubtedly change.  Foursquare has 3 million users to Facebook’s 500 million for starters.  Inevitably, as checking-in through location based services hits the mainstream, Facebook will dominate all comers just based on the simple fact that they are the hub of our online social worlds.  There is a reason that the Facebook movie is titled, “The Social Network” and not “A Social Network.”

If you are not already in the check-in game you may wonder why anyone would do such a thing. The main reasons are that:

It’s Fun – Checking-in is a game.  Some people like to earn the badges and points given for multiple check-ins at a specific place or within a certain time frame.  Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry for many reasons including psychological factors like feeling a sense of achievement each time you master a level or earn rewards.  Getting a virtual badge delivers that same sense of success.

Social Proof – People want to tell others that they are at cool places doing cool things.  This fulfills the same basic needs for connection and  validation that people fulfill by participating in social networks.  Beyond that, it’s a way to see when your friends are nearby and you can spontaneously meetup.

Deals – People love to get a good deal and smart retailers are rewarding people who check-in at their store with coupons and freebies.

In a year or two adoption rates of users for location based check-ins will skyrocket.  There will be a tipping point just like there was for Twitter and Facebook.  People who now say “That’s stupid” will find check-ins to be a part of their daily or weekly routines before they know it. Those of us who have been using Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Brightkite and other LBS services for about two years are using more than one service now and will probably see them all repost to Facebok Places by the end of the year.

The social web is now connected and we are at the beginning phase of the game layer that is creating new functionalities on top of the foundation that social networks have built.  Since Facebook is THE social network, the question isn’t if you will use Facebook Places, it’s how soon you you will start.