Did Facebook just kill check-in apps too?

I hated that ticker two days ago. Now it all makes sense.

At F8 last night, Facebook introduced the idea of tracking your entire consumption history and feeding it in to facebook. The ticker was a way of sharing that information with friends without shoving into their newsfeed. 

The biggest takeaway so far is their integration to Spotify, where others can see what you're listening to and join in the fun for free, with a single click. This is huge for music discovery; now a friend who lives far away can introduce me to something they found without even thinking to share it to me.

Best of all, we can discuss it in real-time. It's the social network dream realised. This excellent post by David Emery sums up why Last.fm should be worried about this.

But there's a wider point that's been missed so far. Check-in apps are dead.

The one that comes to mind is GetGlue, an iPhone app where you can track all your media consumption - movies, TV shows, books, you name it.

It sucked. You have to think to open the mobile app for every little action you take, but when you're drinking a beer at home and enjoying your media library, why would you care to remember this every 30 minutes?

Facebook's idea is to make this process entirely passive, or "frictionless" as they like to call it. No more asking for permission once you enable tracking, it just pushes all your consumption right to your ticker. And they've got everyone under their wing for this; music sites like Soundcloud, websites like the Guardian... just everything. They have everything.

So GetGlue is dead. Maybe Foursquare should worry too. Don't even start me on the tedium that is Google+, where everyone feels entitled to write an essay on nothing because they don't have a 140-char limit. Google are so stuck in yesterday that they think the News of the World is still a leading Sunday paper.

While we're talking about the ticker, it's worth noting that Twitter and its link-everything style is looking decidedly dated. They should have done the hover-for-info idea that Facebook now offers at least one year ago.

I still love twitter, and the community who still hang on there, but wow. Facebook is killing it today.