14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook Places was launched to a lot of hype in the US last month, but the location-based service has been limited to that country. Now the feature has been officially launched in Japan as well, after being in testing for a while.
It makes sense for Facebook to launch Places in Japan since the people there are avid mobile users and location-based services launched so far have proven rather successful.
While there are local powerful players in the sector, outside companies sometime find great success in Japan, most notably being Twitter. Japan is the world's largest Twitter user outside of the US.
Facebook however hasn't been faring as well in Japan as in the rest of the world. The social network is by far the largest on the globe, with over 500 million users, and dominates the market in most countries.
However, there are a few holdouts and Japan is one of them. Interestingly, the local social network Mixi, which is still larger than Facebook, has just launched its own location service descriptively titled Check-in.
While followers of the Japan market say that Mixi's move is clearly a response to Facebook Places, it did land before the official version. Mixi has borrowed ideas from Facebook before, the Like button for one.
In fact, it may very well be that Facebook's move is a response to Mixi's announcement and that the social network had no intention on launching Places there so soon.
Facebook has said that it plans to launch Places internationally, but it had been testing it in Canada and the UK. Of course, the technology is the same, this is not what's holding Facebook back. Rather, the issue may be with the number of places it has in its database.
Facebook Places Japan is pretty much the same service as the US version, it enables users to check into locations, along with their friends, as well as see who's around them at events.