On Monday, Twitter rolled out Twitter Places, its attempt to add a layer of actual venues to its geolocation data. This was made possible by a deal with Localeze, a local business listing service with over 14 million businesses in their database. Now we’re hearing that Facebook has struck a similar deal with Localeze to roll out their own Places area in the near future.
Essentially, what we’re hearing is that Facebook will use this data to populate some new kind of fan pages for places, that businesses will be able to then claim on the network. This is in line with the information we uncovered back in May on Facebook’s mobile site. The code on that page (since removed) pointed to a previously unseen Places tab coming to Facebook.
That code also pointed to some check-in functionality coming to Facebook — obviously, that has yet to show up on the service. We’ve heard whispers that Facebook’s big location push may have been postponed due to the recent privacy flare ups. But more recently we’ve heard that Facebook was also missing a vital component needed for any kind of location service: place data. Obviously, this deal with Localeze would solve that problem.
Still, just how soon this new Facebook Places area would launch is not clear. One source thinks it will be very soon, another thinks it could be several weeks before all the data population occurs.
We’ve reached out to both Facebook and Localeze for comment, but have yet to hear back.
Update: And here’s the typical “no comment” from Facebook:
We don’t comment on any speculation around future products.
