Perhaps one of the best features of Facebook Places was not released with the initial launch … Looking back at the Facebook Places official video, the most compelling selling point is that Facebook helps you digitalize your memories. The fact that you can geo-tag and timestamp photos, videos, and comments, allows you to live back any memories, knowing what you saw, how you felt, who you were with …

Imagine if you were in Hawaii for your honeymoon, taking a cruise to all the different islands … now imagine if each photo had a geo-tag, and a time stamp, and you could comment and add your thoughts and feelings … Facebook places would be the platform to help you re-live this experience, follow your path or trace … but also, what if you come back 5 years from now, to the same place … how nice would it be to match it to your previous experiences? Or how about you go to Disney parks, and you need advice on the rides for your new kids … you can see comments your friends made in previous experiences, recommendations, reviews … ditto for restaurants … you get the point.

Facebook hasn’t made it official, but while I was lecturing last night at the Miami Ad School, I checked in, later on visited the place page, and I noticed that there’s a section titled “Photo Memories“.

Geo-tagging rich content is a huge differentiator against the currently actively vocal by desperation Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s CEO. Let the memories begin.

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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Twitter just launched their official Tweet this button — about time … it comes in three versions (110×20, 55×20, 55×63) with five different settings for customization. You can set the URL obviously, the Tweet text default, via @SapientNitro or some user, related, and count box position.

You can embed with an iframe or embed with a JavaScript hosted at Twitter that will style a pre-determined class in a link. Pretty straight forward of course; how much can there really be for a simple Tweet this button.

You can see it server directly from Twitter here.

Step-by-step instructions by Mashable:

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So W+K has been having fun with Old Spice lately … It’s actually quite impressive to see how every video they produce for Old Spice gets anywhere from 1 to 12 million views …

The latest one, called Old Spice | Questions got 3 million views in less than 1 week.
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I was recently interviewed for the web and TV show “The Rise To The Top” with host David Siteman Garland. We had fun talking about my recent post Social Media 2012 and managed to veer off into some interesting side theories.

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