Earlier today Facebook finally announced the official launch of Facebook places. Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and others covered it live, but if you missed the announcement, here’s what you have to know.

BTW, one thing no one is talking about yet is Places within the Graph API. You can query recent checkins by users, pages, places: GET https://graph.facebook.com/[place/Page/user_id]/checkins

That alone is SO powerful!

Anyways, starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places. You can share where you are and the friends you’re with in real time from your mobile device.

Checking In with Friends

Ever gone to a show, only to find out afterward that your friends were there too? With Places, you can discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time.

You have the option to share your location by “checking in” to that place and letting friends know where you are. You can easily see if any of your friends have also chosen to check in nearby.

To get started, you’ll need the most recent version of the Facebook application for iPhone. You also can access Places from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and geolocation.

Go to Places on the iPhone application or touch.facebook.com site and then tap the “Check In” button. You’ll see a list of places near you. Choose the place that matches where you are. If it’s not on the list, search for it or add it. After checking in, your check-in will create a story in your friends’ News Feeds and show up in the Recent Activity section on the page for that place.

Places is only available in the United States right now. But we expect to make it available to more countries and on additional mobile platforms soon.

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This is a smart move on Coke’s end. Everyone knows that Coke mainly targets teens, and what if instead of marketing to teens, you get teens come to you, promote you, share, chat, and advocate your brand? Dream came true …

Coke organized this experimental amazing hangout villa they called The Coca Cola Village. They’ve been doing it for a few years, or at least I found videos from 2008 and 2009.

This year’s was a little different though, an Israeli agency called E-dologic — part of Publicis, extended the event in effort to bring the Facebook “Like” to the real world. Not only they invited thousands of teens who talk about this through traditional word-of-mouth, but they used the Facebook Presence-like concept where they distribute teens a wristband, they link it to their Facebook account, and the village automatically digitalize, archive, organize, and share their experience. It makes it easy to re-live the fun, read the comments, see their friends, share activities, and for Coke? instant-massive-ultra-influencing system that leverages teens to promote Coke’s brand among their circles.

Really nicely done. As expected, Facebook will keep penetrating the real-world. Next efforts will probably use the open graph to describe more precise locations and describe relationships among people, places, and objects.

If you’re not familiar with the semantic web, the vision is that soon the web will deliver a personalized experience that not only is extraordinarily relevant to you but might also anticipate your desires before you even know them. How would it do this? By using the wealth of knowledge available via your social profile and other digital sources. This evolution of the web isn’t possible, of course, unless some centralized group with some form of open platform can share your social profile — and even, potentially, your location — with any other digital property. It is the inevitable future of our digital world and those who control it will dominate the next phase of the internet.

Facebook’s Open Graph offers far more than the ability to “like pages.” It’s Facebook’s play to power the semantic web.

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Citing a “very credible source,” Digg founder Kevin Rose tweeted that Google is readying “Google Me,” a social network intended to compete with Facebook … The Tweet was now deleted, but not before many sites including Gizmodo, and Louis Gray already wrote about it.

TechCrunch confirmed today that it’s not a rumor, it’s real.

D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s CTO for years, shared his thoughts as an answer to one of the questions on Quora. Here’s his response:

• This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
• They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.
• Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
• They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.

Google has failed over and over again in providing any service that’s user friendly, i.e. Buzz, Latitude, Social Search, Google Friend Connect, Wave, Wave again, especially Wave … Though mark my words, Latitude will take off and will be base of amazing LBS services … Anyways, Google usually lacks of good design and usability, which makes it hard to believe they can compete with Facebook.

But the funny bit is that while Google is going after social networking, Facebook is making the move towards search. Shiv shared some thoughts on Facebook Search, and although I have some different thoughts, [Facebook] Open Graph is the beginning of a new semantic search that goes deep as opposed to broad and finds relevant content based on profile, location, and human recommendations.

So my predictions:

1. Google Me will have amazing technology, platform, have geo-social-mobile as a core, leverage elements from Latitude, Buzz, Open Social, and will be native to all new releases of the Android platform, including Google TV. Their success will rely on Google making a massive effort in making it usable, friendly, and having a good design.

2. Facebook will enter the search war, but not before they enter the display advertising arena. Search is a low priority as it provides less direct revenue opportunity for Facebook, whereas serving relevant context / social aware ads on 3rd party websites using the Facebook Open Graph provides a massive immediate revenue opportunity.

Sony comes out with a new spin to 3d projection, now in Madrid. Instead of going all fancy with braking and shattering buildings, they went with a simple elegant experiences that is cool not only because it’s about 3d soccer experience just in time for the world cup, not only because it’s the first one with real 3d illustrations, but also because they make use of the building’s doors and windows to make it seem more real … it seems like the building is part of it, not just a massive projection area.

Really well done Sony. This projection was again created by NuFormer in the Netherlands and I must say these guys would have to be one of the top mapping agencies out there. The creative concept, mapping precision and execution are simply stunning! I will say that I think the Samsung 3D Projection was still more innovative in it’s concept and execution, but it’s good to see with just 3 concepts out there how different they can be. Now where is the US one? There’s a massive white building in Lincoln road with great exposure that would be ideal for it! Really, I’m sure Sapient will help negotiate and get all approvals to do it