Why Facebook Places Is Already Annoying

Last week Facebook announced the brand spanking new feature added to your profiles called “Facebook Places.”  If you’re new to the world of “check-in” social media tools then get on board with what seems to be a hot trend.  The bottom line is; you use your mobile phone or GPS enabled device to check-in at locations you are currently at.  Once you check-in at a location your profile status will be updated with the your check-in information.

Starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places. You can share where you are and the friends you’re with in real time from your mobile device.

What Facebook developed is nothing new to the social media world.  There are similar sites and apps out there on the market that have caught on first and are being utilitzed.  Foursquare, for one, has been developed for some time now and thet have instilled many more features; badges and twitter updates are just to name a few.  But Foursquare has their own problems they need to work on.

It took me a good couple months to get sick of Foursquare and give up on their service.  Maybe that’s why it didn’t take me long to want to give some pokes at Facebook for this new feature.

Change Your Privacy Settings

One of the biggest problems I have with Facebook is the sheer fact of when a new feature comes to Facebook, they automatically enable all of their privacy policies that control the feature.  Instead, they should disable them from the beginning and let the user enable the privacy issues.  Because most people are unaware or uneducated about the meaning of the change.  Maybe just maybe, Facebook, you might have one less lawsuit in regards to privacy if you do it that way.

There are three new settings in your Facebook profile privacy settings.  Be sure to look at all three of them to make sure you are satisfied.  I have personally denied all aspects of Facebook Places.  No one can see my check-ins and no one can tag me in a check-in.  It’s not that I want to hide where I go but I prefer to have control over what is public about me.

1.) Public view of your check-ins.  Who do you want to be able to see your check-ins.  I, for one, have it only viewable be myself.

2.) When you check into a location you can see who else is there at the same time.  By disabling this option, people will not see that I am at that location.

3.) This is the one that really kind of honks me off.  If you have this option enabled, others will be able to tag you in locations.  I could not have disabled this quickly enough.

It’s really frustrating that Facebook automatically applies these privacy settings when they add features.  Educate yourself with all the settings and beware when new features come to review your privacy settings.  The Facebook privacy settings should not be a “set it and forget it” mindset.  You should continually review your settings and tweak it to your liking on a monthly basis.

Facebook Places has added an all new level of annoyance to the Facebook experience.  Ever since it was released people have hopped on board thinking it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.  But in my opinion it is not starting off on the right foot and is quite possibly the most annoying application next to Farmville.

Can Not Hide Check-ins

I really don’t want to see Facebook check-ins in my news feed.  Even more annoying is you can’t hide the dumb thing.  It’s not like other applications, like Farmville, where you can just hide it from showing up.  Go ahead and try to hide it from your feed.. nope can’t do it.  Now our feeds are flooded with this nonsense.

Made-Up Places

Something that really annoyed me with Foursquare was the ability for Joe Schmo to add places to the system.  Facebook Places allows the same ability for it’s users.  Now we get see check-ins from “Jack’s Garage”, “Fortress of Solitude” and “John’s Couch” in our feeds… that’s freaking great.  I’m really not sure how you could fix that especially since your trying to build up a user base.  But I’d have to say it’s really annoying.

Conclusion

I’m not surprised that Facebook has joined the check-in social media game but I wish they would have given a little more customizing options for your news feeds.  My news feed is already flooded with crap when all I really want to do is see my peep’s status updates and links.  Hey, here is an idea for you Facebook,  please let us customize our start page so we can filter the crap right when we log in without extra clicks.

Good idea jumping on the bandwagon but I fear you are watering down your service to a point where we will get disinterested in seeing crap all day long.  I think you should have kept your check-in service a separate entity.

What are your thoughts on the subject?

Tagged as: facebook, opinion, social media

Article by Joe Porter

Joe has written 30 articles for joeporter.me

I love people, websites, tech & business and everything in between.