Facebook Places Launches in Australia

I wanted, this week, to take a look at how one of the major online newspapers treated the launch of Facebook Places in Australia.  This is a topic that I’ve covered before, when the application was first launched in the States, however I looked at how the story covered by a different major newspaper and a few well-known blogs. 

As I’ve mentioned before, Places has been launched as the Facebook equivalent to the very popular iphone application, FourSquare.  It’s essentially a location-based application used to “check in” at a particular location and find out information about a particular business or surrounds.  Whilst initially seen as a direct competitor to FourSquare, it would seem that both FourSquare and Gowalla are tieing their products in with Facebook Places.

The article in the Sydney Morning Herald last Thursday is largely a copy-based article, with little imagery.  It contains one image of screenshots of the application, but otherwise the layout is fairly content-heavy.  There are numerous links surrounding the article itself, as well as ads and other drivers to other content.  The advertising displayed on this article could be a little more relevant to the likely reader – A Woolworths ad may have been better places somewhere else on the site.

As for the content of the article itself, I think the journalist does a good job of objective reporting and discussing some important issues surrounding the application’s release.  The story focuses largely on the privacy concerns surrounding Places and other location-based applications.  Whilst this is not an entirely new angle (much talk already exists around Facebook and Privacy).  The Journalist uses relevant quotations from Places’ product manager, giving the article credibility and authenticity.  However, I do think some of the objectivity is lost by the use of the phrase "Stalkbook" in the headline.  I feel this is an unnecessary play on people's pre-existing privacy concerns and somewhat negates the level of objectivity achieved through the main article.