At the risk of turning this into a blog that’s exclusively about Facebook Places, I figure I should write a very short piece about Facebook Places actually launching in the UK. So here it goes..

Facebook Places launched in the UK some time this morning.

If you’re wondering why I was looking at Facebook Places in the first place, follow @arunstephens on Twitter, and you’ll be amongst the first to know when my new (location-based, obviously) project is launched.

I hadn’t checked into my home office with Facebook Places for a few days, so I decided to fire up the proxy server and check in tonight. I was pleasantly surprised as what I found.

It appears that a lot of local landmarks (bridges mostly, and the Battersea Power Station) have been added to the Facebook Places database. Does this mean that Facebook have been busy populating their database, ready for the launch? Or has some other geek gone and added all these landmarks just for fun?

I’m guessing the former. Where did Facebook source these locations from? Wikipedia. The descriptions (and titles) match articles on Facebook, which has been geocoding articles for a few years now. Facebook has been using Wikipedia content for some of its “community” Pages since their launch at F8 earlier this year.

Conspicuously on my list is a pub, the Calf, which is about a mile away. Someone has checked in there already, which suggests that I’m not the only one in the area who’s been experimenting with Places.

But back to the Battersea Power Station. Currently, already 129 people like the power station. But none of them have checked in. This suggests that Facebook may well just be converting location-based Pages into Place Pages.

Central London has the same places that I noticed last time, but a few more people seem to have checked into their offices, and Broadcasting House is now listed. Further north (by 0.1 degrees) Ally Pally is there. To the east, we’ve got the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Spitalfields.

Further afield, if I put the Wikipedia-provided coordinates of the Beehive in Wellington, the only nearby place is the City to Sea Bridge, complete with Wikipedia description.

So it doesn’t look like anything international-specific is happening with Facebook Places, just that they are now beginning to add places from other sources to their database. But you never know, maybe the feature will go live soon!