14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook Places has just been launched in the UK. Having been in testing for a period, enabling some UK residents to check into locations, the location feature is now available to everyone. Facebook Places enables users to mark their presence at a location, be it a bar, restaurant, museum, workplace or anything else.
The location-based service has been available in the US since last month. While there have been plenty of reports of the UK version being in testing, Facebook launched Places in Japan last week, the first market outside of the US.
However, Facebook may have planned to release it in the UK first, but hurried to make it available in Japan after Mixi the local social network which dominates the market unveiled a similar feature.
Users of the Facebook mobile app will see the new "Check-In" button. Many UK users area already have the new feature available and it will be rolled out to all in the next couple of days.
There have been reports of the feature being in testing in Canada and France. Facebook says it plans to roll out the feature across Europe soon.
At this point, Facebook has already covered a good portion of its user base as there are 150 million users in the US, Japan and the UK.
Facebook Places launched to a lot of hype and has been generally well received. Surprisingly, especially since this is a location feature, there haven't been too many discussions about privacy related to this feature, certainly not like with many of Facebook previous moves.
Location services have been becoming increasingly popular with the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla seeing big growth in recent months. Facebook's move certainly threatens their position, but there doesn't seem to be any big damage so far. Users of many of the existing location-based services can use those to check in on Facebook.