Facebook Places: a game changer or has the game already been changed?

So I have a confession to make. I’ve never been a user of Foursquare. I don’t want people to always know where I am - not that I’m paranoid but I don’t need my mom to have a list of every bar I’ve visited. Of course you can always opt out of pushing your location to the masses but I feel iffy about the whole thing. I do like the yelp type reviews but then again, I can look at Yelp.

Instead of sleeping as I should be, I’m watching the Facebook Places announcement. Hmmm. So Facebook Places. It’s foursquare. On Facebook. So you now can check in and everyone on Facebook (or just your friends) can know where you are. Hmmm. Like foursquare. And you can tag your photos by location. Like I do on Twitter. You can add reviews of places. Like Foursquare or Yelp. But most scarily, unless you opt out (and this is not a default setting), anyone can tag you at a place they check in to. And your friends could be checking in to your house.

As the announcement continues, the initial partners include foursquare, Yelp and Gowilla who are using the Facebook APIs to integrate their applications with Facebook. Even though they were using this location based application first. Hmm.

So what’s the big deal? What’s so innovative and new? Nothing. But Facebook is a growing monolith with numbers unseen by any other social networking applications. So Foursquare, Yelp and Gowilla, do you sit back and say - “Hey. That’s our shtick”? I guess the answer is no. But how can they not jump on the Facebook bandwagon?

But what do you think? Is this a game changer or has the game already been changed?

**One last note - one of the speakers is going on about how this is a way to share human stories, interact, dust off old memories. I hope they also have a way to disable pictures of exes. Some memories I may not want to relive. In real time or not.**