Facebook Removes Places Map

Did you notice that Facebook removed your places map?  Had I known that Facebook was going to get rid of the Places map faster than O'Malley redrew Republicans off of the legislative map, I would have done a screen-shot of my own map.  Instead, I had to hijack this one off of the Internet.

If you weren't aware of it, you could find it by going to your profile (select your name), then go to More, then select the drop-down menu, then select Places.  Every time you checked into a place, it dropped a marker on the map.  Every time you added photos and added a location, it added it to the map.

When you went to your map or someone else's map, you would see giant circles and smaller circles.  The sizes of the circles represents the number of check-in's or tagged locations. The more check-in's or tagged locations, the bigger the circle.  Obviously, the circle was probably going to be biggest right around where you live.

When you clicked on the circles or zoomed in on the map, the purple circles would scatter into smaller circles towards the more accurate locations.  Further zooming took the locations to its most precise locations on the map.  Then, if you click on the individual circles, you can see information from the check-ins and any pictures that you tagged with the location.

For example, on my map, you would see a medium-sized circle around Washington, D.C.  Zoom in on D.C. and you'd see a circle at the Supreme Court.  Click on that and you'd see my pictures.

If you travel a lot (or like to check-in a lot), you could see all of the places that you've been scattered across the country or even the globe.  I thought this was really interesting.  I really thought it was interesting after we went to Hawaii and I saw the big purple circle over the middle of the Pacific Ocean with big circles up and down the east coast.  I had circles from Indiana, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.  I spent a lot of time updating pictures to their actual places.  I was then going to start adding pictures from old trips to New York, Disney World, Texas, and Germany.  But now that the map is gone, MY incentive is gone.  And my time was wasted.

If you're adding locations, I think it makes sense to aggregate that information into a map.  Some of us actually like that.  Did it cost Facebook a lot of money to maintain the map?  I don't know.  But I certainly found it more interesting than the constant requests for me to tell them if I've seen a movie and to rate it.

What do you think?  Do you miss your Facebook places map?  Or did you not even know you had one?