Taking an if-you-can-beat-them, join-them-and-beat-them attitude, SCVNGR is today unveiling its integration plans for Facebook Places and launching new features to take of advantage of both Facebook Places’s read and write APIs.
SCVNGR is just one of a handful of companies that has access to both APIs. The startup believes it is the first mobile game to integrate with Facebook Places.
SCVNGR’s mobile game layer for the real world possesses checkin functionality akin to Facebook checkins, but the integration is designed to magnify what SCVNGR does best — “the cool things you can do beyond the checkin,” says CEO and Founder Seth Priebatsch.
He’s not kidding. Instead of just posting checkins to Facebook Place Pages, SCVNGR users will notice that the activity they share with Facebook is kept in tact to maintain its original form on Facebook. Should a SCVNGR user perform a social checkin, that story is tied to a Facebook location, posted to the Place page and shared on the user’s wall. The same rules apply for captured photos, scanned QR codes and other completed app challenges.
The Facebook Places integration extends outside of Facebook and into the SCVNGR iPhone and Android apps as well. App users will now have access to the wealth of checkin activity happening on Facebook, further enriching its update stream. For a startup that’s just recently started to go after consumers, this could be just what the service needs to attract and keep new users.
At the end of the day, SCVNGR wants to share Facebook’s expansive playground. “Facebook Places is beneficial for anyone in the location space not specifically doing something around the checkin,” says Priebatsch.
In fact, Priebatsch believes that Facebook’s location direction cements the soundness of his own decision to go after building a game layer and not a checkin application. To that end he says, “Foursquare and Gowalla are in a less advantageous position. At [Facebook Places'] core, it’s competitive.”
Those are fighting words that the young CEO cannot yet back up with proof. The Google-backed startup says it’s sitting pretty and seeing “phenomenal” new user growth week over week, but no concrete numbers have been released.
More About: checkins, Facebook Places, facebook places api, scvngr
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