Facebook Planning All Out Assault On Geolocation & Check-ins

After digging through JavaScript code, TechCrunch is reporting they’ve found some interesting tidbits in relation to Facebook’s plans for geolocation and the ever-popular “check-in” functionality- signaling that Facebook is planning an all out assault on the likes of mobile geolocation and the ecosystem surrounding it.

Visiting the touch-screen optimized version of Facebook causes the site to hang for an extended period of time, indicating that code being called isn’t working properly.  Digging deeper with debug mode enabled reveals that the site is attempting to populate something called the “places_tab.”  Since this feature (presumably tied to Facebook’s geolocation functionality) isn’t yet enabled, the error is thrown out.

It looks as though Facebook has created a mobile version of the site using the HTML5 location component to grab your location information from your phone, which then takes you to this new Places area of Facebook that presumably will have a list of venues around you.  From there, you can easily check-in.  Beyond basic geolocation data, Facebook looks to have built-in functionality to also acquire a user’s altitude, heading, and speed to boost accuracy and lessen the impact of “check-in cheating.”

Although speculation has been largely laid to rest with these findings, there’s still a lot of ambiguity surrounding exactly what Facebook has planned, but it looks to be rather comprehensive.