Now everyone has access to that feature — any app can use the API to write to Facebook Places.
The other big news revolves around Search. Facebook is given developers access to its database of venues — the developer sends in the coordinate, and Facebook gives back a list of nearby locations. And these aren’t based exclusively by proximity — the list will be ordered based on the relevance to the user.
This database will be competing with Google’s Places API, as well as other sources of location data like SimpleGeo. It isn’t a purely benevolent move, either — Facebook will be able to further improve its database as more people check in.
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Authors: Jason Kincaid