I recently gave a presentation to a graduate advertising class about social media with ideas on how it might be used as a part of an overall marketing and advertising strategy ((I’ll get this posted soon. I’ve just gotten my templates fixed (Thank you Angry Porcupine!) and will be able to move the material shortly.)). One of the things I covered was the concept of geo-tagging and how it relates to social media. There are tremendous privacy concerns related to geo-tagging, but also interesting market opportunities as well.

Day 70/365.v2, by Perfecto Insecto

We ignored the unintended geo-tagging that occurs when people use location services in their mobile phones, or use cameras that are location aware and focused on check-in applications.  Some examples of these applications are the popular FourSquare and Gowalla ((Also included in this list would be BriteKite and Yelp)). Well, it seems Facebook has now joined the fun, and added Places. Included in the launch was an updated Facebook application for iPhone that included the new logo, which as Jay Dolan points out, is a perspective view on a square where the roads draw a four.  Is it war?

Maybe.

But with Facebook falling under fire from privacy advocates recently, will Places stoke the smoldering fire into something more substantial?

Of course, you really need to try it to understand how it works. I’ve only begun to experiment with it, but not until I checked the updated privacy settings.  It looks like Facebook did this one right and set the defaults to share, but only with your friends. It should probably default to sharing with nobody, but that’s what we have.

There is another area just below this one, however, that requires you to choose if you want to let your friends check you into places (boy this could be fun).

There are two settings for this one, either enable or disable.  How much do you trust your friends?  How tightly do you control your friend list? I just went through a detailed exercise of limiting and purging based on the settings Facebook provides for us, so having certain friends see my location would not be that big of a deal to me. That said, my ability to limit this to certain groups with the extra granular privacy controls seems a bit broken right now.

Before you go into the weekend, be sure to check your privacy settings and make sure you have it set the way you want, and then give it a shot!

This post originally appeared on BrandenWilliams.com.

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