Facebook Places is an location aware service similar to Foursquare. It basically allows users to check in from locations, and more. Places helps you “share were you are”, “see who is around your” and “see what is going on” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the press event.

The rollout of the new service began today on the iPhone and the Facebook Touch website for users from the United States. Facebook users from foreign countries may see messages related to Places from their friends living in the US though, but they cannot use the service yet. Some people from the US are currently seeing a message that Paces is not available in their area yet. According to Facebook it may take a day or two before it is available to every user.

Places displays a list of friends once it has been started, including nearby friends. If the user checks in, a list of places nearby appears with the option to add new places that are not listed yet.

Each place offers a recent activity listing, and checked in users see friends and other people who have checked into the same place.

facebook places

Facebook seems to have put a lot of thought into the privacy of the feature, obviously fueled by the privacy problems of the past year.

The default settings are configured to be visible to friends only, with the possibility to reduce the visibility further by restricting it to selected people only.

Tagging is available, but restricted so that it only becomes possible to tag people if checked in as well (if you want to check in a friend at a sleazy bar you have to check yourself in there). Users can opt out of tagging completely.

Privacy settings seem to be spot on this time, including options to turn of unwanted features.

Additional information available at the official Facebook blog.

So what’s possible with this technique besides the three default dynamic bookmark folders? Users could display all bookmarks that are tagged with a specific tag, display the latest ten pages that they visited on a specific domain or to list the least visited bookmarks. Many additional possibilities exist and it is just a matter of defining the database query correctly to achieve them.

The basics first. Database queries are added as normal bookmarks and placed in the location field instead of the usual url. The name can be selected freely. Database queries use the place:query syntax. Let’s take a look at an example:

The above query is “place:queryType=0&sort=8&maxResults=10″ uses the filters queryType, sort and maxResults.

queryType=0 will return an URI for each result
sort=8 will sort the bookmarks by visit count
maxResults=10 limits the results to ten bookmarks.

The guys at the Mozillazine forum did a good job of listing the relevant queries and it would be redundant to simply copy and paste their work here. Just head over to the forum and take a look at the queries. If you want to have a specific query and cannot get it to work let us know in the comments and we try to build it for you.

Users can either edit the five quick links in the Windows Registry which is not as trivial as it sounds or use a application like Places Bar Editor (via Lifehacker) to edit them comfortably. The software is compatible to Windows ME, 2000, XP and Windows Vista and supports the (different) Places Bar of Microsoft Office, or precisely Microsoft Office 2007, 2003, 2000 and XP, which is different from the standard Places Bar.

The software displays the five places that can be changed in tabs. One for Windows and one for Microsoft Office. The user has the choice to pick a system folder, like Desktop, Send To or Printers or chose a folder from his system that will be placed as a quick link in the bar. Please note that all five locations will change even if you only edit some of them. By default all are shown as Desktop links and you could end up with one custom link and four links to your Desktop if you changed only the first quick link manually.