Facebook Places a Week Later: Using It?

It’s been a week … well, nine days to be exact … since the launch of Facebook Places.

Are you using it? Do you know anyone who is?

In many cases, the survival of a new product, tool, web site, or whatever, depends on how much adoption comes from the early adopter crowd: tech lovers, web geeks, social media fanatics, and so forth. (Twitter is only recently gaining in general adoption because the early adopters have stuck with it for years despite so-called competition from the likes of Pownce, Plurk, and many others.) But, in my experience, the typical early adopters aren’t bothering with Facebook Places. In fact, neither are a lot of regular users.

I have 350+ Facebook friends — mostly tech crowd and marketing people, the kind of folks who usually jump on new tools and products. But also some regular users — old high school friends, some local folks here in the Tri-Cities, and so forth. As I bring up Facebook Places right now on my iPhone, this group of 350+ people only has 10 check-ins over the past 24 hours.

My wife, the very definition of an average Facebook user (by that, I mean she’s on there chatting with friends constantly!), has not used Facebook Places once. I had a business lunch today with three well-connected friends, all in the web/marketing industry, all Facebook users … and only one checked in via Facebook Places. (It wasn’t me.)

So, first question: Is my experience unique? Do you find people in your Facebook network are using Places? I’d love to be know if what I’ve seen is unique.

Second question: If usage is lower than you thought it would be, why?

I’ve been thinking about a few possible reasons:

Checking-in to places just isn’t something average people care to do.
Related: Facebook hasn’t given its users enough of a reason to check-in. No discounts, no crowns/games, etc.
The people who are into check-ins are already knee-deep in using Foursquare, Gowalla, or Yelp and aren’t inclined to change.

So there you go … some late Thursday night ramblings on Facebook Places. Comments are open. Would love to hear your opinions and experiences.

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