Instagram Testing Facebook Places

Facebook has had its own native check-in service in one form or another since August 2012.  But Facebook Places hasn’t been a leader in check-ins. Foursquare is the titan in the field, but with a recent Instagram tweak, this could change very soon.

According to Fast Company, a small group of Instagram users have been presented with Facebook Places login infrastructure instead of Foursquare. While places has never been particularly popular for live location sharing, users have been geotagging photos, albums and status updates for years, so Facebook does have a bank of location data at its fingertips.

Foursquare is tied to Instagram because Foursquare has been providing data and functionality through its third party API, which is also used by Pinterest, Vine and Flickr.