Facebook’s Places Editor – and what’s wrong with it

No sooner than I complained about its disappearance, it’s back!

This is an update to a previous post where I’d found the Places Editor, and then thought I’d lost it again. I’ve now found it and have taken some screen grabs!

You can see what the first page looks like, why I get the choice of Northern Ireland, I have no idea!  I chose to tag duplicates, those things *really* annoy me.

Here’s what happens on the next, and it highlights one of the problems with the Places database:

You get a map and a bunch of entries from the database and you can tag each entry as to whether it’s a duplicate of the place shown, or specifically tag it not a dupe or you can leave it alone.

The interface needs some work. I don’t know why you’d get the option to tag it three ways. Surely easier to have just one button to ‘Confirm duplicate place’. Also the tick/cross is confusing. You’d think it was asking you to confirm if this entry was correct or not. It isn’t, it’s asking you to say if you think it’s a duplicate or not.

This mechanism needs to be made more fun – you just get screen after screen of data to correct, this gets boring without a good goal. I’d be interested in stats to show how many other people thought the entries were wrong, as well as knowing how much of a difference anything I do here is making to the database.

The most infuriating thing however is the inability to correct the actual location of the place in question! You can see here where FB has tagged ‘Paramount’ and where it actually is (in the Centrepoint Tower).

One of the big problems with adding new places is when the FB app grabs your GPS co-ordinates and how it verifies them. Some entries are several streets away from where they’re supposed to be, some are miles away. This is likely to be caused by the phone moving while the new entry was made, maybe the GPS cache in the phone was out of date.

So, yes I like being able to make edits to the database, but surely it’s important to have the actual locations correct too?

Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away

Places database gets fractionally more accurate, then doesn’t

I’m a Facebooker. I admit it, and I also admit that I’ve read most of the manual and pressed every single link on my page to see what happens. I get notifications delivered to my phone so I know the moment someone tags a photo of me that’s less than wholesome.  (Try doing that on Twitter when you have T-Mobile!)

So I was intrigued to find a new icon nestled in my apps navigation yesterday which said Facebook Places editor.

—

Update: The edit screen came back! Check out this post with new screengrabs.

—

I paraphrase the blurb which said something like ‘You use Places a lot, and you do a lot of tagging, so here’s a tool to help make the database better’.

I was offered a choice of places within the UK, or just places me and my friends checkin, and I could also choose to add additional information, or tag duplicates. I chose the duplicates, those things *really* annoy me.

Then I got a map and a place and a bunch of entries from the database and you can tag each entry as to whether it’s a duplicate of the place shown, or specifically tag it not a dupe or you can leave it alone.

The interface needs some work. I don’t know why you’d get the option to tag it three ways. Surely easier to have just one button to ‘Confirm duplicate place’. It also needs to be made more fun – you just get screen after screen of data to correct, this gets boring without a good goal. I’d be interested in stats to show how many other people thought the entries were wrong.

The most infuriating thing however was the inability to correct the actual location of the place in question! OK, so the duplicates and the misspellings of the dupes annoy me, but the thing that’s surely most important is that the marker for Heathrow Terminal 1 is actually in the right place!

One of the big problems with adding new places is when the FB app grabs your GPS co-ordinates and how it verifies them. Some entries are several streets away from where they’re supposed to be, some are miles away. This is likely to be caused by the phone moving while the new entry was made, maybe the GPS cache in the phone was out of date.

Anyway, in case you’re wondering, there are no screen grabs of any of this, because when I logged onto FB this afternoon the Places Editor had gone 😦

Did they think my corrections were rubbish? Was I mistakenly put into this app and then someone realised and took me out?

Comment if you have the Places Editor, as a basic web search reveals absolutely no info about it whatsoever!