… it’s just been revamped, renamed - and put on steroids. 

There has been a lot of confusion lately concerning the future of Facebook Places. Last month Techcrunch announced that Facebook was killing Facebook places and replacing it with geotagging of status updates. [Update: Gigaom also made a big deal about Facebook killing Places.] This message has then been repeated, distorted and misunderstood by tech bloggers all around the internet. 

But now, as the latest Facebook updates have been implemented - both on the web and in the mobile app - we can see that nothing has been killed at all.

True, in the mobile app, Places has been replaced with the new title Nearby, but the functionality is the same and you can still check in. All these screens below are from the new and updated Facebook app for iPhone:

As you see, you can still check in, but you can ALSO geotag all of your status updates. The nice thing is that you can both geotag your status updates with venues such as restaurants, and with general locations such as cities.

Then, in order for Facebook to group both specific venues and locations into something more unified, they have renamed “Places” to “Nearby”. Quite clever, since that gives them a much broader, less venue-specific approach to local. 

Again, to make this clear: Facebook has not really killed anything. What they have done is renamed, and then broadend their approach to local data. 

Since our startup Tripbirds.com uses geodata from Facebook this is a relief. But it’s more than that.

At the moment, the location data that users add to their status updates can not be accessed through the Facebook API. But this is probably just because the Facebook team hasn’t had time to integrate this functionality into the API yet. When they do, there will be much, much richer data about users location to access even for third party developers like us. And that’s awesome. We think Tripbirds has the potential to become an even more amazing service after these updates. 

So if you think Facebook Places is dead, think again.

And long live Facebook Nearby.