Meet the new Facebook Places team!

facebook said they have been working on places for 8 months or so / Techcrunch reported hotpotatoe being acquired about a month ago...

If they kept the secret for 7 months I would be impressed; perhaps a talent acquisition to work on places (and some added IP)

Congratulations!

>"Facebook is still small"

Is that an understatement?

Anybody to explain what was Hot Potato site anyway? I see it's a site where you register and post stuff. But what was unique for it?

It started out as a way to talk about events that were happening now. So, you'd more or less check into an event and be able to converse. Then, it turned into another twitter clone, where you could post what you were doing, listening too, whatever, and then you could have inline conversations about it. Nothing terribly exciting, but enough to get the attention of Facebook. I'm guessing this was all for talent and nothing more.

Is it true they are shutting them down?

probably they are going to use their core engine or something like that. or probably not. who knows...