Facebook Places lets you share your location

Facebook is considered the best of the social networks online. Its services grow continuously, so does its user base. Their new service launched today might be – it’s called Facebook Places and it allows users to share their current location on their status page and tag others that are there with them.

The online geo-location services are part of the social networking experience for some time now – dedicated services like Foursquare and Booyah are offering this kind of services as we speak. As its use on mobile devices is growing, Facebook seems to have its own geo-location service, partnering with dedicated services to integrate with services with Facebook Places.

Facebook users – only in the United States for now – can use Places to check in to the location they are at the moment, posting it to their status page online.  Users access Places and check in to a location on the list that appears – or they can add a place if it is not listed. They can also tag those who they are with as present in that location or see who else on their friends list is present in their current location.

For the beginning, Facebook has updated its iPhone and iPod Touch apps to include the Places service. Users that do not use the iPhone to access Facebook and have a mobile browser that supports HTML5 and geo-location can access the service via the internet address touch.facebook.com.

The new Places feature will leave the user in control: those using the service will be able to control what to share (or not to share) – users can’t be tagged unless their settings allow it, and will be notified if somebody tags them as present at the location. Only friends will be able to access the information gathered by Places, unless otherwise set in the user’s Privacy settings.