Facebook Places has been around for way too long now for its poor UI and inconsistent experience to be tolerable. The launch of Places hasnt changed my behavior one bit - I'm still an active Foursquare user - but for all the people who are using Places, Facebook really needs to update some basic stuff. 

The biggest annoyance is the fact that unlike all other check-in or local-business discovery apps, Facebook still has not bothered uploading a basic local business directory into Places. This means that unless someone has manually added it - no Place you check-in to has an address, phone number or any other information except its GPS lat/long location displayed as a pin on a map. Here is a screenshot of what my nearby Martha & Bros coffee looks like on Facebook Places vs. 4sq. As you can see the 4sq version has the address and phone number of the business.

This is bad enough on mobile, but when you're on Facebook.com its an even funkier experience. Facebook often promotes recent Places check-ins by your friends. Depending on what information is available for which business, you can get a number of inconsistent experiences:

1. zero address info - if you were browsing around and landed on this, you dont even know which city or country this place is in.... i just landed here through a FB-promoted link.

2. some user-inputed info - this at least shows the correct city, but its clearly been entered by some user as you can tell from "the mall!" description text.

3. address info - some lucky businesses get their address in there somehow.

C'mon Facebook... even a tiny startup like @Matchpin has all standard business listings available in the app for users to select from, with pre-uploaded address, GPS and phone numbers. I'm sure you can manage this.