HN user
In terms of profiteering: What's strange about FBs promotional way of advertising is that stores almost get into a price war to get the customers. In the end, only the customers win and stores will simply struggle to make more profit, impeding them to offer better services. Google's way of advertising is a lot more interesting because it simply announces what a service provider has to offer without it having to change it's product price.
Working on something similar. The business plan is coming this February. In fact, I'm looking for financing to get it started.
http://miximum.ca/en_newProjectPage-kiosk.html
gallerytungsten, I agree with you that it's part of the race, but I believe Facebooks approach is fundamentally different.
What's important in this idea is that the content has to be geographically significant to the consumer. Some apps focus on other things, like game mechanics, search, etc. As mentioned in the FT.com article: "Facebook’s application can “check in” to a physical location, such as their local coffee shop,". Significant geolocalized information is key. For example, this concept clearly works a lot less well on a PC. Has to be on mobile or in my case a well localised kiosk.
The objective is to make it significant. Adding friend metadata to the info makes it more important to us.