This month I ran four workshops on social media - two for a corporate audience, one for a political audience and one for a religious audience.

And in each case, when I was asked what's the next big thing in social media, my answer was ‘geo-location.

I have written about geo-location before. In my column, Geo-location the new 'new thing', I highlighted Foursquare, a leading player in the social media geo-location game.

I mentioned that both Facebook and Twitter - the two heavyweights in social media - were looking to roll out geo-location.

Last week, FacNONEebook officially entered the geo-location space with the launch of Places, which lets you and your friends virtually check-in to locations (just like Foursquare does).

For the uninitiated, here's how it works. Let's say you visit an establishment like a restaurant, coffee shop or bookstore; you can pull out your phone and ‘check in’ to that location. Once you do so, the people in your network (or everyone, depending on your privacy settings) will know where you are.

The instinctive response you'll get whenever you tell anyone about this concept for the first time is ‘Whatever for?’ But geo-location has struck a chord with quite a lot of young people, especially those who are socially active and like the idea of unplanned encounters with friends who happen to be nearby.

Facebook has published a video overview of the service which explains the concept behind geo-location.

There's another potentially popular appeal that is not articulated in the video,  which is to receive special offers of discounts from retailers if you are a frequent visitor or patron of those places.

Foursquare, for example, allows people to collect virtual badges if they visit a place often enough, and if you are the all-time most frequent visitor of that place, you become the ‘mayor’ of that location.

It's easy to imagine shops using geo-location services as a loyalty point system although it's still early days for this, even in the US.

Privacy issues, options

Facebook's membership base of over 500 million worldwide will give its geo-location service critical mass straight away. But in order to get one-up on Foursquare, Places will offer a little bit more than just the ability for you to check in to place you visit. In an unusual twist, it even allows your friends to check you in.

Can anybody say ‘invasion of privacy’? Most definitely, but Facebook views this as similar to its photo-tagging system which allows others to tag you in a photo they've uploaded.

Of course there are privacy options that allow you to decide who can see the tags. You can also delete any tags others made of you. And if you want, you can disable the ability for others to tag you altogether.

The main problem with such options is that most people are not aware or are not familiar with them. And quite a number of people would not be bothered to meddle with privacy controls even if they knew they existed.

This can lead to serious privacy breaches, so I'm going to teach you here how to control your Places privacy settings.

When you arindonesia and internete in Facebook, click on ‘Account’ and choose ‘Privacy settings’. On the ‘Custom’ menu, click on ‘Customise setting’. This will take you to a ‘Things I Share’ Page. There are three privacy options you should deal with.

The first is ‘Places I check in’ which indicates who can see your check-ins. I recommend you limit this to ‘Friends’ only. You could also allow ‘Friends of Friends’ or ‘Everyone’ but unless you are a politician or some kind of public figure, it's not wise to opt for these.

Next up, look at the ‘Include me in 'People Here Now' after I check in’ settings. This option allows others know you're at a particular location via the location's page or in a search for people near you. My advice is to disable this.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, if you don't want to allow your friends to check you in, scroll down a bit more and go to the section called ‘Things Others Share’ and find ‘Friends can check me in to Places’. Disable this.

Once you sort out these three privacy settings, you are quite safe to explore geo-location through Places.

Who knows, one day soon, you might be eligible for special offers, discounts or freebies from your favourite retailer. Take my word for it, geo-location is going to be big.


OON YEOH's new social media book 'Like Me, Follow Me' has just been published by MPH. You can connect with him via Facebook and Twitter.