Facebook unveiled its location-based service Facebook Places at a launch event last evening. Places allows users to check-in with their current location. Upon check-in, you can see who else is at the location and tag friends who are there:

• Check in and your update will appear on the Place page, your friends’ News Feed and your Wall.

• Tag the friends you’re with so they can be part of your update.

• Appear in “Here Now” to friends and others nearby who are also checked in.

• Browse status updates of friends checked in nearby.

• After checking in, tap “Here Now” to see who else is checked in where you are.

At the moment, you can check-in using the newly updated version 3.2 of Facebook app on the iphone or point your non-Apple touch screen smartphones at url touch.facebook.com. Facebook plans to add Places to its other mobile apps in future.

Facebook Places has an API and will play nice with existing location players Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt etc.

Visit Facebook Faces page to find out more

Tom Scott developed a site he called Evil that displays random Facebook users with their phone numbers using standard Facebook API. The phone numbers are public info on Facebook, although their owners probably thought it is secured.

Phone numbers can be obtained using means such as white pages, but Evil shows that your Facebook info is probably public to the world even though it might not be what you want. And most Facebook users either assume all things private by default or do not setup the privacy settings in Facebook to their liking, or simply do not bother about it.

Evil by Tom Scott

When you look at the best Twitter clients not from Twitter Inc, the choices are often TweetDeck and Seesmic. And it sure took a while for us to see Seesmic finally made it to iPhone/iPod touch, and the wait is worthwhile. Seesmic is not just a Twitter client, you can use it to manage your Facebook accounts and it has ping.fm integration. And lets hope Google Buzz support, which is available for Seesmic Desktop version, comes to Seesmic iPhone soon.

Seesmic iTunes link

“I’m trying to make the world a more open place by helping people connect and share.” – CEO Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg

But according to this interesting article from Inc.com, clearly there is double standard if you look that how the CEO is using Facebook himself.

Are we to believe Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t used his own product since April 21st? The alternative means he has a hidden, private account. Nah, can’t be! Zuckerberg reportedly thinks the age of privacy is over.

As of May 18th, his last posting was on April 21st. He hasn’t created a new photo album since 2009. He has over half a million users who like him, but he has no friend on his profile. We think he is just too busy, too busy to even employ a proper PR executive.

Curious to find out what information Facebook is sharing about you through the company’s latest Open Graph API? Courtesy of developer Ka-Ping Yee, you can now visit his site to find out.

The Open Graph API is the latest API released at Facebook’s recent f8 developer conference on April 21. What Yee does is to show you exactly what kind of information about you is exposed by Facebook via the new API. This is also a good tool to check if your privacy settings is working, as many probably are confused on how to choose their Facebook privacy settings with its constant changes and revisions.

Source: Gigaom

You can setup iChat to enable chat with your Facebook friends. Facebook’s chat service is powered by Jabber/XMPP, which is the same open source chat protocol used by Google Chat. This enable iChat which support Jabber to connect to Facebook chat.

First you need to get your Facebook username. You can find out about your Facebook username from Facebook account settings page (Account > Account Settings). Username is not setup when you create a new Facebook account. Visit the account settings page to set your username, which will require verification by Facebook using mobile number.

Open the iChat Preferences and select the Accounts tab. Click the ‘+’ icon to add a new account to iChat.

On the Account Setup dialog, select “Jabber” for account type. Account name is your Facebook username. Password is your Facebook login password. Expand the Server Options and enter “chat.facebook.com” for Server and set the Port to 5222.

That’s it. You should now be able to communicate with your Facebook friends using iChat without opening Facebook in a browser.

Facebook has been busy with three launches this week:

Facebook Lite

Facebook launched Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of Facebook and you can access it via url lite.facebook.com. Intended for bandwidth limited developing countries, it strips the Facebook to its cores and sans applications. We find the lite version refreshing with its leaner and cleaner layout, and it probably will become our Facebook version of choice looking forward.

@Mentions

Not sure if it is inspired or threatened by Twitter, Facebook has introduced @mentions in status updates. When you type @ with your friend’s name in your status updates, it means a reply to your friend. This allows conversation and is one of Twitter’s strongest feature. Followed closely by recently launched real-time search and FriendFeed acquisition, we sure hope Facebook can have more originality.

Facebook Desktop Notifications for Mac

Facebook has released a Mac native app that when launched will sit on the OS X menu bar. It will alert you when there are new activities on your Facebook. Clicking on the app icon on the menu will drop down a menu where you can access easily update your status, compose message, view list of message in inbox etc. Download the app from Facebook.

Facebook has submitted the latest major revision of its iPhone app to iTunes App Store for review and approval. There are lots of improvement and new features in version 3, check out the video:

Follow Facebook engineer @joehewitt where he twits about the development of the Facebook iPhone app.

David Fincher (“The Game”,”Seven”,”Fight Club”, “Zodiac”, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) is in early talk to direct a yet titled Columbia Pictures movie about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Producers Scott Rudin, Mike DeLuca, and Kevin Spacey are hoping to get Fincher on board and the film into production by end of the year. The script by Aaron Sorkin (“A Few Good Men”,”The West Wing”) is being kept tightly under wraps, it is said to be printed on hard-to-photocopy red paper. The movie is scheduled to release in 2010.

Here’s the link to the “Untitled Facebook Movie” at imdb.com. There is not much info at imdb.com at the moment since the movie is in early development.

Will the flick be more documentary than drama? Will it have enough plot points to keep the story interesting? Will it reveals secrets or even being controversial? Will Mr Zuckerberg endorse this movie? We will see.

Facebook announced in a blog post that Facebook Usernames will be opened for your choosing starting at 12:01am EDT on Saturday June 13.

Facebook Usernames provides vanity URLs to make it easy for people to visit your profile or Pages on Facebook. Instead of numeric number, your chosen username will form your new Facebook URL.

The username is on a first-come, first-serve basis. Expect a landrush when the service goes live this Friday midnight. Choose your Facebook username at www.facebook.com/username/.

Think carefully about the username you want as you won’t be able to change or transfer it once selected. To prevent abuse and name squatting, Facebook prevents you from choosing a username if you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after June 9 at 3pm EDT.

Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer. Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (“.”). While usernames are currently available only for Romanized text, we’re looking at how we might support non-Romanized characters in the future.

Check out the Facebook Usernames FAQ.

Get details here if you are managing Facebook Pages.