Facebook Location In Action. Meet Facebook Places!

We’re sitting here in the waiting room at Facebook waiting for the supposed location event to start. Facebook won’t say officially what the event is about, but it seems like everyone knows. And now we know for sure. Earlier, we found code evidence of the new Facebook Places area. Now we’ve found the feature itself. Welcome to Facebook Places.

The following screenshots are from the touch version of Facebook’s website. The same place we originally found the location code months ago. As you can see, there’s a new Places tab. When clicked on, it shows friends who have geotagged themselves at various locations (both of the people in the shots below are Facebook employees — no surprise there). When you tap “Share where you are with friends” from here, it brings up a list of nearby places. Yes, it’s Facebook check-in.

Update: And like that — it’s gone. But we’re here live at the event. Expect a lot more to come.

Update 2: It came back for a second. We got a glimpse that you can “like” individual places — no surprise there.

Facebook May Make Location Announcement Wednesday

We’ve just received an invitation to visit Facebook’s Palo Alto campus on Wednesday to get “an update on the service’s features and products,” and rumor has it the powers that be want to talk about location-based products.

Kara Swisher at BoomTown says her sources “indicate that Facebook will finally be rolling out its own geo-location offering” on Wednesday.

If this is true, it would fulfill a promise made to developers months ago at Facebook’s f8 conference, when we first thought the feature would launch. Such an announcement would, moreover, substantiate the subsequent months of “coming soon” rumors and verified quotes we heard from Facebook execs and others.

In May, informants had said the new product’s release was no more than four weeks away. However, Facebook’s crowd-pleasing privacy changes put a hold on the upcoming location feature launch; at the time, we were told several projects in development were tabled while engineers and other staff scrambled to revamp the site’s privacy settings. At a Q&A session during the privacy features launch, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the debacle had sidelined location plans altogether.

But again in June, Zuckerberg told attendees at a London Facebook Developer Garage event, “We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon.”

In short, we’ve heard (and repeated) the words “coming soon” a few too many times when it comes to Facebook’s location plans. We hope that Wednesday, we have something to actually show our readers for a change.